Praise for Email Marketing Demystified
“I’ve done email marketing for over a decade and have interviewed over
1,000 entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses, and I still
learned a lot about growing an email list from Email Marketing
Demystified. What sets it apart is that Matthew does not give empty
theories. He shows actionable techniques that he used to build a 200k+
mailing list and includes examples of how he used those techniques.”
Andrew Warner
Founder and CEO, Mixergy
Mixergy.com
“Email Marketing Demystified is a great primer. I thought the book was a
really great primer for anyone that doesn’t understand the mechanics of
the process of email marketing.”
Perry Belcher
Co-Founder, Native Commerce
Co-Founder, DigitalMarketer
DigitalMarketer.com
“Matthew has already walked the walk with email marketing, and now
he’s committed his knowledge to paper. Recommended.”
Rob Walling
Co-Founder, TinySeed
Host, Startup for the Rest of Us
StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com
“Matthew provides a step-by-step process that makes email marketing
approachable and accessible to entrepreneurs at all levels. If you are just
getting started with email or you already have a mailing list of 10,000
subscribers, Email Marketing Demystified can help grow your business
through the power of email marketing.”
Jaime Tardy
Founder, Eventual Millionaire
EventualMillionaire.com
“Email marketing is an incredibly valuable marketing channel. I do it in
my business, but I know I could be doing it a lot better. Email Marketing
Demystified is a deep dive into the trenches of effective email marketing
that shows what actually works. I found the book to be easy to digest and
came away with some great takeaways that are immediately applicable to
my business.”
John T. Meyer
Co-Founder, Lemonly
Lemonly.com
“With so many new options in social media, it seems some current
marketers put more emphasis on techniques for selling rather than on
creating value and true service. In this book, Matthew gives step-by-step
practices to grow exponentially by giving massive value while honoring
the time proven principles of integrity and wowing our customers. I
expect this book to add $1 million in new revenue to our business this
year.”
Dan Miller
New York Times bestselling author of 48 Days to the Work You Love
48Days.com
“If you have any doubt about the power of email marketing, Email
Marketing Demystified will quickly dispel them. In the book, Matthew
lays out an easy to implement step-by-step plan to create your own email
marketing system that actually works! This book is a must-read for any
entrepreneur that runs an online business and is prepared to IGNITE!”
John Lee Dumas
Host, EntrereneurOnFire
EntrepreneurOnFire.com
“I’ve known Matt for several years now and watched him build several
semi-automated businesses that created hundreds of thousands of dollars
(and now into the millions) quickly. A little story: I shared with Matt an
email “having a sale” sequence that I thought would quickly add 30% or
more in revenue when one of his businesses was still under six figures.
Instead of 30% growth he turned it into around 300% growth in a year.
Listen to Matt when it comes to email for building a company fast. Read
Email Marketing Demystified and follow Matt’s step-by-step plan and
you too can grow your business rapidly.”
Tim Conley
TimConley.net
“Email Marketing Demystified is packed with real-world-tested
strategies, tips and tricks only a veteran of email marketing would know.
If you are new to email marketing, Matt’s detailed, step-by-step methods
will cut your learning curve by years and allow you to start monetizing
that portion of your business immediately. Even as an experienced email
marketer, I found gems I implemented into my own business that have
helped me grow my subscribers more quickly. Matt has a knack for
thinking of ways to grow and monetize an email list that you probably
never considered!”
Tim Bourquin
Co-founder, After Offers
AfterOffers.com
Email Marketing Demystified
Build a Massive Mailing List, Write Copy
that Converts, and Generate More Sales
Third Edition
MATTHEW PAULSON
Email Marketing Demystified: Build a Massive Mailing List, Write Copy that Converts, and
Generate More Sales
Copyright © 2015, 2019, 2022 by Matthew Paulson. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Please do
not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.
Published by American Consumer News, LLC
First edition: October 2015
Second edition: March 2019
Third edition: October 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9905300-5-3
Cover Design: Rebecca McKeever (marketbeat.com)
Editing: Craft Your Content (craftyourcontent.com)
Book Design: James Woosley (freeagentpress.com)
DEDICATION
To my children, Micah and Adylin (Ady), I love you more than
anything in the world. You provide the hope, inspiration, and joy that I
need to get up early every day and continue to grow my businesses.
To my wife Karine, thank you for continuing to support and
encourage me in everything I do. Thank you for not shaking your head at
me whenever I come up with a crazy new business idea and thank you for
allowing me the opportunity to provide for our family in unique and
creative ways. Most importantly, thank you for being my best friend.
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
Foreword by John McIntyre
Introduction
Chapter One: Selecting an Email Service Provider (ESP)
Case Study #1: MarketBeat
Chapter Two: Building Your Mailing List Through Your Website
Case Study #2: Signwell
Chapter Three: 16 Ways to Grow Your Mailing List Independently
of Your Website
Case Study #3: GMB Fitness
Chapter Four: Mailing Your List: How, What, and When to Send to
Your Audience
Chapter Five: Writing Email That Inspires Users to Take Action
Case Study #4: USGolfTV
Chapter Six: Monetization: Six Ways to Make Money with Your
Mailing List
Chapter Seven: Email Deliverability and List Maintenance
Case Study #5: Oliver Wicks
Chapter Eight: Legal Aspects of Email Marketing
Chapter Nine: Outbound Email Marketing
Chapter Ten: Web Push Notifications: Your Second Email List
Case Study #6: GoGo Photo Contest
Final Thoughts
Appendix: Additional Email Marketing Resources
Thank You
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PREFACE TO THE THIRD
EDITION
The first edition of Email Marketing Demystified was published
almost eight years ago. The social media landscape has shifted
dramatically during that time. Some platforms like Vine and Google+ no
longer exist, while new platforms like Instagram and TikTok have
generated massive user bases in just a few short years. Marketers that
invested in building audiences on the wrong platforms lost big and people
who were early to Instagram and TikTok have benefited from these
platforms’ rising popularity.
While social media platforms have come and gone, email’s role as
the most-used communications platform online remains unchallenged.
The number of global email users surpassed 4 billion people in 2021.
That’s nearly 4 times the number of users that the largest current social
media platform, Facebook, has registered. Nearly 100,000 non-spam
emails now sent every single second. Billions of dollars’ worth of
commerce are conducted over email every year.
Marketers have certainly had to adapt to the changing technical and
privacy landscape surrounding email. However, the time-tested strategies
and tactics that fuel effective email marketing campaigns have not
changed significantly since the first edition of this book was published in
2015. This is a testament to the stability, longevity, and profitability of
email as a marketing tool. Email is the slow, steady, and massive platform
that allows marketers to build audiences that will last for years, even
decades if managed properly. While social platforms are important tools
for marketers, email is the marketer’s platform that will stand the test of
time.
Since the second edition of this book was published in early 2019,
there have been several developments that warranted writing a new
edition of this book:
Email is now a mobile first experience, with more users than ever
reading email primarily on their smartphones.
New legislative privacy initiatives, such as the California Consumer
Privacy Act, have given users more control over their personal data.
Email providers, most notably Apple, have made it more difficult to
accurately track open rates and users’ location data.
Simple email publishing platforms such as Substack and Revue have
made it easier than ever for individual writers to grow an email audience.
Email newsletters have come back in a big way, with companies like
Morning Brew and The Hustle building media companies whose primary
media platform is email.
A new generation of email service providers are gaining popularity
among marketers.
New best practices, such as the use of triggered email campaigns,
have emerged as compelling email marketing tactics.
The third edition of Email Marketing Demystified has been updated
to discuss these developments in detail including new best practices, tool
recommendations, and tactics to leverage in your email marketing
program. When you read the third edition of Email Marketing
Demystified, you can rest assured that you are learning the latest email
marketing information and strategy.
At MarketBeat, we have now sent more than 5 billion emails to our
subscribers since launching our service in 2011.
Our email marketing program has grown significantly since Email
Marketing Demystified was first released. We have grown our email list
from 250,000 subscribers to nearly 3 million subscribers over the last
eight years. We attract approximately 125,000 new subscribers each
month through our organic opt-in forms and paid media efforts. We now
spend approximately $500,000 each month on advertising to grow our
email list through co-registration advertising, Google AdWords,
Facebook ads, and other paid media platforms. In 2022, we expect to
send more than 3 billion permission-based emails and generate $25
million in revenue from premium newsletter subscriptions, newsletter
sponsorship ads, and dedicated advertising emails to our mailing list.
Email marketing is the core of our business and I sincerely hope that
you will be able to benefit from the skills, knowledge, and strategies I
have picked up while building MarketBeat during the last decade.
Matthew Paulson
October 1st, 2022
FOREWORD
by John McIntyre
“But John, isn’t email marketing dead?” Dave asked.
I sighed.
It was 11:30am on a sunny Tuesday, and I was checking my email at
Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok, Thailand.
I was en route to the U.S. to speak at a conference on the power
email marketing has to make sales and revenue explode.
I had to laugh at the irony.
I had built a profitable business with email marketing, which
generated 100% of its profits from email marketing, yet I was repeatedly
being told by people like Dave that email marketing was dead.
These people were smart business owners who just didn’t get it.
They thought email marketing was a waste of time.
That it didn’t work.
That it made people want to punch their computer.
Who could blame them?
We’ve been told “email marketing is dead” for years.
According to the “experts,” no one checks email anymore. They’ve
all moved over to Facebook, Twitter, Pinstagram, Instarest, or whatever
the latest social network is called.
Plus, most of us consider checking email to be a “necessary evil.”
We don’t check email because we love it. We check it because we have
to. We’d rather be checking how many likes our latest post on Facebook
received.
But as business owners, our personal relationship with our inbox is
not indicative of whether email marketing works or not.
Like every great marketer, Matt cares more about data than human
emotion, and that’s why he begins Email Marketing Demystified by
describing what the data says.
As it turns out, the data tells a very different story than what we’ve
all heard.
Did you know that a study from the Direct Marketing Association
found that businesses earn an average of $43.00 for every $1.00 invested
in email marketing?
In other words, email marketing is proven to produce a 4,300%
return on investment (ROI).
In the same study, not only did email marketing deliver a whopping
4,300% ROI, but it also beat every single other advertising channel
including social media, search engine optimization, and direct mail.
Email marketing is not dead. Not even close.
But that’s not all …
If marketing channels were cars, even the best social media and SEO
campaigns would be like a Mercedes Benz—fast and luxurious, but
certainly not the best in their class—while email marketing would be a
McLaren F1 or a Lamborghini Gallardo.
Email marketing doesn’t just beat everything else. It leaves them in
the dust.
And so, I have a question for you:
Have YOU implemented an email marketing strategy yet?
If you have, are you optimizing it, improving it, and always striving
to make it better?
If you aren’t, you are making a huge mistake.
Depending on the size of your business, you could be leaving
hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table. Maybe even millions.
All because you haven’t taken the time to implement an effective
email marketing strategy.
Well, it’s time for that to change.
When it comes to email marketing and learning how to generate a
4,300% ROI, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather learn from than Matt
Paulson.
Why?
Because unlike other so-called “experts,” Matt lives and breathes
email marketing. He is a bonafide expert.
One of his businesses is a financial newsletter which goes out to
more than 900,000 investors on a daily basis.
Marketing books usually present ideas from some “fly by night”
wantrapreneur who has never achieved anything substantial.
But that’s not what you’re going to get with Email Marketing
Demystified.
Instead, you’re going to get email marketing strategies from
someone who knows how to apply them to wildly different businesses in
totally different markets.
As a successful serial entrepreneur with a growing multimilliondollar empire built largely on the back of the email marketing strategies
you’re about to learn, Matt is the real deal.
By now, I’m hoping that you’re ready to generate a 4,300% ROI in
your business (and you’re ready to let someone as smart, successful, and
savvy as Matt help you do it).
So let’s talk specifics:
What are you going to learn in Email Marketing Demystified?
First, you’ll get the low-down on the best email service providers for
your business, including which companies offer the best features for the
best price (and which will burn a hole in your pocket without offering
you much in return).
Next, you’ll discover the art and science of getting people to sign up
for your email list on your website, including how to create a killer lead
magnet that stops even your coldest prospects dead in their tracks and
makes them sign up. Plus, you’ll also find out exactly which type of optin forms to add to your website for maximum conversions (and how to
craft the perfect message that communicates to your ideal prospect’s
deepest desires).
Now comes the part most people dread … creating the email
campaigns. However, you have nothing to worry about because Matt
explains how writing amazing emails can be easy, simple, and fast. This
is where you’ll learn the ins and outs of creating email campaigns that are
opened, clicked, and bought time and time again.
Plus, Matt even does a deep dive on copywriting (one of my favorite
topics) and shows you how to write blockbuster emails on command.
Once you have your email software, lead magnet, email opt-ins, and
various campaigns, you’ll get to the most exciting step in the book:
Monetization (in other words, how to make money with your email list).
In this section, Matt goes into all the various ways you can generate
revenue from your email list (he even surprised me with a few methods of
monetization that I wasn’t aware of).
When it comes to monetizing your email list, selling your own
products and services is the most common method, but it is far from the
only method. Matt also covers co-registration advertising, selling another
company’s products, and running newsletter ads. He also explains how
you can rent out your email list to other companies (this is perfect for a
business that has an email list but no products of their own to sell).
After monetization, you’ll jump into the dark, murky area of the
legal side of email marketing. When does email marketing become spam?
How can you avoid breaking the law while also serving your customers
by selling your products and services?
Once you’ve made it through the boring-but-totally-necessary legal
aspects of email marketing, Matt hits you with some killer tips on how to
avoid the spam box and promotions tab; how to maintain a good
reputation with Gmail, Yahoo!, and the other email companies; and how
to ensure your email campaigns get delivered every single time you send
them.
The final section of this book delves into cold email outreach, also
known as outbound email marketing. This topic is particularly important
to my company at the moment as we are doing a lot of cold email
outreach. I was glad to find several tips and tricks in this section that I’m
sure will improve our results. If your business sells high-ticket products
and services like mine, cold email outreach is the strategy for you.
So there you have it:
Email Marketing Demystified is the complete guide to email
marketing—from getting people onto your email list, converting them
into customers with amazing campaigns, managing the legal side of
things, and using cold email outreach to sell high-ticket products and
services.
If you’d like to see breakthrough growth in your business, read this
book and follow Matt’s advice to the letter. It will transform your
business. You will end up with more money than ever, with more time
than ever, and you will finally be able to create the lifestyle you’ve
wanted since the day you got started in business.
I’ve personally experienced the amazing benefits of email marketing
in my own business. I’ve also seen it again and again in my clients’ and
customers’ businesses.
Email marketing works like rocket-fuel for businesses … but only if
you implement what you learn.
So please, please, PLEASE: don’t just read this book … take action
and enjoy the incredible results (because you deserve no less than the
best).
Email marketing is not magic, but it certainly starts to feel that way
when you see such incredible results.
When you implement these strategies and discover that they work
splendidly, please email me and let me know how it worked out for you.
I would love to hear from you.
Best of luck,
John McIntyre
The Autoresponder Guy
john@themcmethod.com | TheMcMethod.com
Best-selling author of Email Marketing: 63 Money-Making Insights
From The Wildly Popular McMethod Email Marketing Podcast.
Medellín, Colombia
July 23, 2015
INTRODUCTION
Email is one of the most powerful and underutilized marketing
channels available on earth. It has been the primary means of electronic
communication since the 1970’s. Since then, numerous bulletin board
services, instant messaging services, chat services, social networks, and
other “email killers” have come and gone. Yet email continues to serve as
the core communication platform of the Internet—and it’s only growing.
Currently, 4,037 billion people, more than half of the world’s population,
have access to email and more than 3.4 billion non-spam emails are sent
and received every hour of every day of the year.1
Despite the widespread use of the digital juggernaut that is email,
many entrepreneurs have yet to implement an effective email marketing
strategy in their business because they don’t know how to do it or haven’t
recognized how powerful of a marketing channel email can be. Email
Marketing Demystified hopes to change that by providing a step-by-step
guide for any business (or nonprofit) to leverage the power of email
marketing.
Why Email Marketing?
Email provides you the opportunity to send a message to your
audience for any purpose on any day of the year at effectively no cost to
you. This is an incredibly powerful communication channel. When you
do email marketing well and send the right messages to the right people
at the right time, you are certain to build an audience of highly engaged
fans that can’t wait for your next message to hit their inboxes.
Additionally, they are ready to buy whenever you have a product or
service to promote.
There are several compelling reasons that your business should
adopt email as a marketing channel:
Email Marketing Generates Massive ROI
A study from the Direct Marketing Association found that a business
will earn an average of $43.00 for every $1.00 invested in email
marketing.2 In a study from GigaOm, marketers have consistently
ranked email marketing as the single most effective strategy for
generating awareness, acquiring leads, generating sales, and
customer retention.3
Email Marketing Generates Long-Term Results
MarketBeat first started collecting opt-ins in late 2010. Nearly a
decade later, a good number of our subscribers that signed up during
the first year continue to read our content, engage with our
advertisers, and buy products and services from our business. Your
email list is a long-term asset that will generate revenue and social
capital for your business for many years to come.
Most Customers Want Email from Businesses
A study from MarketingSherpa found that 72% of U.S. consumers
say email is their favorite way to communicate with the companies
that they do business with. 61% of consumers reported they like to
receive weekly promotional emails from their favorite brands, and
28% of consumers want to receive promotional emails more
frequently.4 Additionally, 70% of consumers say they will always
open email from their favorite companies,5 and 95% of people who
opted in to receive email from brands say that the marketing email
they receive is either somewhat useful or very useful.6
Email Marketing Dramatically Outperforms Social Media
Marketing
A study from McKinsey & Company found that businesses are 40
times more likely to create a new customer from email marketing
than they are through social media.7 Another study found that 66%
of marketers believe email marketing delivers a “good” or
“excellent” ROI, while only 41% of them said they feel the same
way about social media marketing.8
Email is Ubiquitous
Nearly 87% of the population in the United States has Internet
access in their home,9 and 95% of consumers use email.10 You just
don’t have to worry whether or not any of your potential customers
have an email address or not.
Email is a Resilient Technology
Email has effectively existed in its current format since the early
1980s. That was 15 years before most homes had a personal computer
and Internet access, and 25 years before the first iPhone was released.
Despite the world’s massive amount of technological progress and the
proliferation of personal computers, smartphones, and tablets, the
technical specifications for email have only been updated a handful of
times in the last 30 years. While other communication technologies have
come and gone, email continues to withstand the test of time. When you
invest in email marketing, you know that the medium won’t be replaced
by a bigger and better thing a few years from now.
Email Doesn’t Have Platform Risk
When you build an audience on Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram,
you are totally at the mercy of the whims of a company whose best
interests are not aligned with yours. You could put a lot of time,
energy, and money into building an audience on a particular
platform only for that platform to change the rules in such a way that
kills the profitability of your campaign. That will never be the case
with email, because no one company has control of the technical
specification for email or control over the technology infrastructure
that allows email to be delivered to the world’s six billion inboxes.
Email marketing continues to be one of the most effective and most
resilient marketing strategies for both digital businesses and brick-andmortar companies. It’s hard to match the potential ROI offered by email
marketing, and you can rest assured that your email marketing efforts will
continue to generate revenue into the future.
Email Marketing Is Not Dead, But It Is Changing
Every now and then, a technology expert or a journalist will come
out and declare the demise of email. In 2009, technology columnist John
C. Dvorak argued that email is dead because of spam, competing social
media platforms, security problems, and several of other issues.11 In
January 2014, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz declared that the
world had reached “peak email” and said that the business world would
quickly move to other platforms.12 Inc.com Contributing Editor, John
Brandon. wrote in April 2015 that email would be obsolete by 2020.13
While claiming that email is dead or dying makes for good click
bait, such claims aren’t in line with reality. Email serves as the core
communications platform of the Internet, and email usage is only
growing. Radicati expects the number of worldwide email users to grow
by 11% between 2021 and 2024 to more than 4.481 billion people. Every
major online service in the world, ranging from social media services like
Facebook and Twitter to e-commerce stores like Amazon and Walmart,
requires you to provide an email address to do business with them. Email
is deeply ingrained into the fabric of the Internet and won’t be brushed
aside by a competing service anytime soon.
This isn’t to say that email marketing is the same today as it was ten
years ago. Email newsletters written by individual authors have come
back in a big way, as journalists have realized they can create their own
media platform using tools like Substack (substack.com) and Revue
(getrevue.co). Companies like The Hustle (thehustle.co) and Morning
Brew (morningbrew.com) proved that is possible to build a media
company entirely around email. Email has become a form of news media,
which is great news for email users and marketers alike.
Email marketing has also gotten more complicated for marketers.
New privacy regulations, including Europe’s General Data Protection
Rules and the California Consumer Privacy Act, have made marketers be
more careful about what information they collect and store about their
subscribers. Email providers are limiting what data that marketers can
collect about their subscribers by blocking tracking pixels and location
data. Email providers are also innovating on top of email’s base
specification to create multiple inboxes and new ways to filter messages.
While these developments require marketers to innovate, they are not an
existential threat to email marketing and are ultimately good for a world
that increasingly values privacy.
Isn’t Email Marketing Spamming?
Some people who are unfamiliar with email marketing think that all
types of commercial emails are spam. “Spamming” is sending the same
commercial message indiscriminately to many recipients without their
permission. Modern email marketing is based almost entirely on first
receiving someone’s permission to email them. When you provide news,
updates, and product information to someone that has signed up on your
website to receive news, updates, and product information, that’s not
spam.
While there are unscrupulous email marketers that use spam as a
marketing strategy, most email marketers only send email to people that
have opted-in to their mailing lists and have specifically asked to receive
email from them. Savvy email marketers know they can generate much
better business results by cultivating an audience that wants their content
than by indiscriminately spamming their marketing material to strangers.
I Hate Marketing Email and Pop-up Opt-In Forms. Why
Would I Want to Send Marketing Email to My Audience?
Many tech savvy people have a natural aversion to advertisements
and other marketing materials. They think they are immune to being
influenced by advertising and think advertisements just get in the way of
their experience when using the web. They use ad-blocking plugins to
remove ads from their web browser and use strict spam filters to keep
unwanted messages out of their inboxes. They absolutely hate pop-up
opt-in forms because they think they are annoying. If it were up to them,
they would never receive any kind of marketing email, because they think
that it just clogs up their inboxes.
If this sounds like you, you may initially feel uncomfortable with
many of the recommendations in this book. Remember that you are not
your audience. Just because you don’t like to receive email from brands
doesn’t mean your customers feel the same way. While I try to stay off
most mailing lists and ensure my personal inbox is empty at the end of
every day, my wife, Karine’s, inbox is full of promotional email from
every major clothing retailer and she loves it. She loves getting coupons,
deals, and seeing what new styles are coming out. She receives at least 20
emails each day from brands and it doesn’t bother her a bit.
Not everyone uses email in the same way. You might see your email
inbox as a work “to do” list that needs to be cleared out. Other email
users see it as a stream of information where they can pick and choose
what they want to read and ignore. If an email user loves the content that
you produce, of course they will want to have that as part of the email
influx they receive every day. The entire process of list building, setting
up an autoresponder series, and sending broadcast emails is just a way for
your audience to better engage with the content and products that you are
already producing through their email stream.
Every now and then, I’ll hear someone that runs a website say
something like, “I hate pop-ups and I hate marketing email. I would never
use them in my business.” What they’re really saying is, “I hate making
money” because email marketing is an incredibly effective marketing
strategy. They just can’t get past their personal biases against advertising
to recognize the opportunity that’s before them. If one of your audience
members wants to get your latest content and product information
through email, you should allow them to do so despite any personal
misgivings you might have against seeing advertisements on the web. If
someone genuinely doesn’t want to receive email from you, they won’t
fill out an opt-in form on your website.
My Story
During the last decade, I have built four different businesses that rely
heavily on email marketing. My largest business, MarketBeat, publishes a
daily investment newsletter to 3 million subscribers. MarketBeat
generated more than $25 million in top-line revenue in 2021 and most of
that revenue is directly attributable to email marketing. The company
sends out more than 300 million permission-based emails monthly and
attracts more than 125,000 new opt-ins each month. The company
generates revenue through subscription information products, newsletter
ads, display advertising, email list rentals, SMS text message ads, web
push notification ads, and co-registration advertising.
The second business I built was called Lightning Releases, which
was a press release writing and distribution service that used email as one
of its primary marketing strategies. I started this service in 2012 as a lowcost alternative to some of the more expensive press release distribution
services. For $99.00, the service allowed individuals, businesses, and
nonprofits the opportunity to have their press release featured in news
portals like Google News, Bing News, and Topix, as well as the websites
of many major national newspapers. The business generated more than
$200,000 in 2014. I sold it to a couple of investors in early 2015 so that I
could focus on my other projects.
The third email-driven business I helped launch is called GoGo
Photo Contest (gogophotocontest.com), which helps animal shelters and
humane societies raise money through donate-to-vote photo contest
fundraisers. I co-founded this company in 2013 with a couple of good
friends of mine, Jason and Stevie Shea. GoGo Photo Contest uses
outbound email marketing to contact executive directors of animal
shelters and educate them, then make them aware of how we can help
their organizations raise money. The company works with approximately
200 animal welfare groups each year and has helped animal shelters
across the country raise more than $25 million in donations between late
2013 and 2022.
Finally, I was a partner in a company called USGolfTV, which is a
digital publishing company that produces a regionally syndicated
television show that’s available in 12 million homes and 25 states.
USGolfTV also produces premium video training courses that help
golfers improve their game. USGolfTV was founded in 2010 by Todd
Kolb. I acquired an equity stake in the company in August 2014 and was
tasked with helping the business build an email list and grow its ad
revenue. In my first 12 months with the company, USGolfTV grew its
email list from 5,000 subscribers to 75,000+ subscribers using the
strategies outlined in this book. The company also doubled revenue by
promoting its courses more heavily to its growing email list.
There are many different resources that teach email marketing that
are of varying degrees of quality. Some of them are written by people that
don’t have a lot of experience and don’t really know what they’re talking
about. You can rest assured that this is not the case with Email Marketing
Demystified. The information and advice written in this book comes
directly from my personal experiences building MarketBeat, Lightning
Releases, GoGo Photo Contest, and USGolfTV. None of the information
in this book is theoretical, made-up, or unproven. Every tip, trick, and
strategy in this book has been tested and proven in at least one of my
businesses.
What You’ll Learn in Email Marketing Demystified
Email Marketing Demystified is a comprehensive work designed to
teach you every aspect of email marketing. In the first chapter, you’ll
learn about the necessity of having an email service provider and the
different types of email service providers that exist. You’ll also learn what
to look for in an email service provider and decide which service is best
for you.
In the second and third chapters of this book, you will learn how to
collect email sign-ups. I will show you how to create a lead magnet to
attract more sign-ups on your website. You will also learn which types of
opt-in forms work best and how to craft your messaging to maximize the
number of opt-ins you receive. These chapters will also help you discover
other creative ways to grow your mailing list independently of your
website.
In the fourth and fifth chapters of the book, you’ll learn about
welcome emails, autoresponders, broadcast emails, and other types of
messages you will send to your list. These chapters will show exactly
what types of email you should send to engage your audience and
generate revenue. There is also a deep dive into email copywriting so that
you know exactly how to write different types of messages to your list.
The sixth chapter focuses entirely on monetization, or how to make
money with your mailing list. You will learn six different ways to
generate revenue through your email list, including co-registration
advertising, selling your company’s products and services, promoting
another company’s products as a service, running newsletter
advertisements, renting your email list, and generating traffic for your
website. If you want to learn how MarketBeat generates more than $25
million per year through email marketing, read this chapter.
The seventh and eighth chapters of Email Marketing Demystified
focus on the legal aspects of email marketing and making sure that your
messages get delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes and not in their spam
folders. You will learn about the United States’ CAN-SPAM legislation,
Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL), Europe’s General Data
Protection Rule (GDPR), and what you need to do to stay compliant with
them. You will also learn about the best practices to follow to maintain
your reputation as an email sender and keep your domain name and IP
address off blacklists.
The ninth chapter of this book explains generating sales through
outbound email marketing, also known as email prospecting. Most of the
book focuses on attracting subscribers and keeping them engaged with
your mailing list. This chapter focuses on identifying prospective
customers, introducing your business to them through a cold email,
qualifying them as customers, and generating sales. If your business has a
relatively small set of potential customers and sells relatively high price
point products with an average order size of $500.00 or more, read this
chapter first.
The tenth chapter was a new addition to the second edition of this
book. It focuses on the emerging technology of web push notifications
(also referred to as browser notifications). MarketBeat has attracted more
than 500,000 web push subscribers and now generates seven-figures in
revenue annually from its web push campaigns. You will learn about push
notification service providers, how collect web push subscribers on your
website, what type of content to send you to your web push list, and how
to generate revenue from your web push audience.
In the appendix, there are links to several other resources that will
help with your effort to become a better email marketer, including books,
blogs, podcasts, and educational products that are worth checking out.
There are also four different case studies placed throughout the book to
show you what kind of results and successes are possible through email
marketing.
This book references several specific email marketing tools, plugins,
and services you can utilize to get started quickly with your email
marketing efforts, ensuring you can be confident in using reputable
products and services. There are comparisons of the features and benefits
of specific products. I also have a few personal product recommendations
within the book, so keep an eye out for them. Please note that neither I
nor my company receive any payment or any form of compensation of
any kind for recommending these few products. I will only recommend a
specific product or service if I truly think it is the best solution for my
friends, business partners, acquaintances, and other readers of this book.
A Call to Action
Email marketing is an incredibly powerful marketing channel that
will generate massive long-term results. You won’t become a millionaire
overnight by implementing email marketing in your business, but you
will see steadily improving returns as your email list grows and your
strategies mature.
If you had started gathering email addresses on your website five
years ago, you could have had a mailing list of tens of thousands or
hundreds of thousands of subscribers today. You would have built a longterm asset that could continue to generate revenue for your business even
if everything else implodes, because you can always create a new
product, service, or other offers and promote it to your mailing list.
While you can’t go back in time and start your mailing list five years
ago, you can do the next best thing and start growing your mailing list
and implementing email marketing in your business (or your nonprofit)
today.
CHAPTER ONE
Selecting an Email Service Provider
(ESP)
The first step in developing your email marketing program is to put
the technical infrastructure in place to handle the type and volume of
email you will send. If you were going to set up a call center, you would
never try to run it using only your personal cell phone. You would hire an
expert to tell you what you need, get dozens of phone lines and other
telecommunications hardware, and put software in place specifically to
handle routing calls.
Likewise, you should never try to run an email marketing campaign
using your personal email account. A standard Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo
email account will typically only let you send about 500 outbound
messages per day, provides no list management tools, and will not ensure
compliance with anti-spam laws such as CAN-SPAM. Consumer email
accounts are simply not the appropriate tool for building and managing an
email list. Instead, you will want to work with an email service provider
(ESP) that provides specialized web software and infrastructure that can
help manage your mailing list and deliver email to your subscribers.
What Email Service Providers Do
An email service provider is a company that provides web-based
email marketing software and delivery infrastructure to businesses,
nonprofits, and individuals.
Here are some common tasks that your ESP will handle:
List Management
Your ESP will store the list of active subscribers on your mailing
list(s). They will also automatically add new subscribers to your
mailing list that sign up through your opt-in forms, process users
that want to unsubscribe, and remove old email addresses that are no
longer valid.
Opt-in Forms
Your ESP will provide you with HTML opt-in forms that you can
easily embed on your website to get people to sign-up for your
mailing list. Some ESPs also provide dedicated landing pages that
you can send people to that will allow them to opt-in.
Templates
Your ESP may offer pre-made HTML templates that will provide
your email with a unique look and feel. Most ESPs also offer the
ability to upload a custom HTML template created by you or a web
designer that you hire. It may also offer the ability to ensure your
HTML template is compatible with most major email clients.
Autoresponders and Mail Scheduling
Your ESP will let you send a pre-written series of emails to all new
subscribers over a period of several weeks or months. This is known
as an autoresponder series. Your ESP will also allow you to create a
calendar of future mailings and schedule mailings to send out at a
particular date and time.
Marketing Automation
Some ESPs will allow you to send a series of messages in response
to users that take a specific action, such as opting in for a new offer,
purchasing a product, or abandoning their shopping cart on an ecommerce site. This functionality, known as marketing automation,
allows you to send more targeted email to your subscribers and will
likely improve the long-term success of your email campaign. The
quality of marketing automation tools can vary widely from ESP to
ESP. If marketing automation is something that you want to take
advantage of, select an ESP that was built with marketing
automation in mind.
Mail Delivery
Sending a large volume of email requires a significant technical
infrastructure and knowledge of how email deliverability works.
Your ESP will provide the servers and software needed to deliver
your email messages to subscribers’ inboxes. They can also help if
you ever run into a deliverability issue, such as being blacklisted.
Tracking
Your ESP will be able to track important metrics related to the
performance of any given email campaign, including the total
number of sends, opens, bounces, clicks, and unsubscribes. Some
email service providers may also provide a tracking pixel that will
allow you to tie any given sale back to a particular email.
Spam Testing
Your ESP can gauge the content of each email that you send against
commonly-used spam filters. You will receive an automatic warning
if you use language found in many typical spam messages (such as
“prescription drugs” or “free money”) or make other technical
mistakes that may cause an email provider to block the message or
deliver it to a subscriber’s spam folder.
Dynamic Messages
Your email service provider will allow you to dynamically
customize the content of each email to tailor it to each subscriber.
The most common use of this functionality is to open each email
with “Dear [FirstName]” instead of a more generic greeting.
HTML and Text Formatting
Your ESP will be able to create emails that are formatted as both
HTML and plain text, which may improve your deliverability rates
to some email providers.
Types of Email Service Providers
Not all email service providers (ESPs) provide the same tools and
functionality. There are three categories of email service providers that
have different strengths, focuses, and levels of service: email API
providers (EAPs), email service providers (ESPs), and marketing
automation providers (MAPs).
Email API Providers
Email API providers (EAPs), also referred to as email infrastructure
providers, focus primarily on the actual delivery of your email. They
provide the network infrastructure and email deliverability expertise
necessary to make sure that your email gets delivered to your subscribers’
inboxes. EAPs generally do not provide list management services,
templates, marketing automation, or email scheduling tools. They are
primarily used by software developers that do their own list management
through custom software. They are often used to send transactional
emails, such as welcome messages and order confirmation messages.
EAP users will often schedule messages using an SMTP server or an API
provided by the EAP in lieu of a web interface. Generally, you will only
select an EAP over a general ESP if you are writing custom marketing
software or are using a piece of third-party software that requires an
outside email server.
Here are some commonly used email API providers:
AmazonSES - aws.amazon.com/ses
Elastic Email - elasticemail.com
Mailjet - mailjet.com
MailGun – mailgun.com
PostMark - postmarkapp.com
SendGrid – sendgrid.com
Socket Labs - socketlabs.com
It is important to note that the quality of service can vary
substantially between EAPs. In my experience, you get what you pay for.
My business, MarketBeat, had a less than desirable experience with a
low-cost EAP several years back and has since then moved all our
mailing over to an enterprise plan with SendGrid.
Email Service Providers
Like EAPs, email service providers (ESPs) provide the necessary
network infrastructure and deliverability expertise needed to make sure
that your email makes it to your subscribers’ inboxes. ESPs will also
provide all the list management, templating, mail scheduling,
performance tracking, and spam testing that ESP customers expect. If you
are building a general mailing list for the purpose of sending newsletters
and other content to your audience, an ESP is your best bet.
Here are some commonly used email service providers:
Aweber - aweber.com
Constant Contact – constantcontact.com
Campaign Monitor – campaignmonitor.com
ConvertKit – convertkit.com
Drip – drip.com
iContact - icontact.com
GetResponse – getresponse.com
MailChimp – mailchimp.com
Marketing Automation Platforms
Marketing automation platforms (MAPs) include a superset of the
functionality that email service providers offer. In addition to providing
email delivery infrastructure and list management services, MAPs will
provide special tools that allow you to send a specific email series to an
individual subscriber based on any actions they take or tags that you
assign them. For example, if a customer purchases a certain product, you
might want to send them a series of emails that provide instructions to use
that product. With a MAP, new customers will automatically be tagged as
a purchaser of that product and will receive the email series that you set
up ahead of time. When set up properly, MAPs can send more targeted
and relevant email to your subscribers, which will dramatically improve
the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
The line between email service providers and marketing automation
platforms has blurred during the last several years. Some older ESPs have
added marketing automation functionality to compete with services that
were built from the ground up with marketing automation in mind. At the
same time, MAPs have worked to make sure they offer the same level of
list management and email delivery services offered by ESPs.
Here are some commonly used email marketing automation
platforms:
Active Campaign – activecampaign.com
Drip – drip.com
Hubspot – Hubspot.com
Keap (Infusionsoft) – keap.com
Klaviyo – klaviyo.com
Ontraport - ontraport.com
Purchase Considerations
When selecting an email service provider, there are several factors to
consider. Here are some things to keep in mind:
Type of ESP
Determine whether you need an email API provider, an email
service provider, or a marketing automation platform. Unless you are
writing custom software and need to send email through an API call,
your best bet is to choose one that offers high-quality list
management services and advanced marketing automation tools.
While you might not use marketing automation functionality when
you are getting started, you will want to have it available for use
later due to the incredible value it can provide to your email
marketing efforts.
Functionality
Most email service providers offer a similar baseline of
functionality, including list management, email delivery, templating,
spam testing, and message scheduling. List any advanced features
that you might want to leverage in your email marketing strategy
and compare competing services to see which might offer the best
combination of tools and services for your business.
Age of Software
Email service providers do not age well because of a variety of
software and database issues. Some older ESPs launched between 10
and 20 years ago have simply not been able to keep up with the
functionality, user interface, and quality of service offered by those
launched more recently. Older ESPs must deal with massive datasets
of customer information and with legacy software code, which make
them difficult to upgrade over time.
Cost
Pricing between ESPs can vary significantly based on your usage
and the level of service provided. Use an ESP’s pricing page to
calculate your cost now based on your current sending level and
consider what using an ESP will cost you as your mailing list grows
over time.
Customer Service
Some ESPs offer much better customer service than others. If you
inadvertently get added to a blacklist or have some other
deliverability issue, you are going to need an ESP that has your back
and can step in to correct the situation. Use Google to search for
customer reviews of the ESP you are considering and search for the
company’s name followed by the word “sucks” or the word “scam”
to see how many users are dissatisfied with a given service.
Terms and Conditions
Some ESPs will suspend your account without warning if too many
users mark your emails as spam or if you have too high of a bounce
rate. Make sure you that you read the terms and services of the ESP
you are considering and understand what circumstances are grounds
for shutting down your account.
One consideration that many businesses take into account is email
deliverability, but I would not put too much stock into any reviews of a
particular ESP’s deliverability. If you are sending from your own domain
and a dedicated IP addresses that your ESP provides, the email service
provider you choose will make no meaningful impact on your
deliverability. If someone is having deliverability issues with their ESP, it
is much more likely they are having deliverability issues because of their
individual sending practices and not some larger issue that impacts all
customers of a given ESP.
Take a considerable amount of time to research and compare email
service providers before selecting your ESP. After you have started
building a mailing list with an ESP, it can be difficult to switch to another
provider. A new ESP might require you to reconfirm your entire mailing
list, which could cause you to lose a large portion of your subscribers.
When switching ESPs, you will also lose your past message history and
performance data as well.
Choosing the Right ESP for You
In the previous section, I provided a framework for you to evaluate
and compare multiple email service providers. There are many good
email service providers that will serve your email marketing efforts
perfectly well. If you only have basic marketing needs that do not extend
beyond sending email to a mailing list and setting up an autoresponder
series, every well-known ESP will work for you just fine.
For specific types of email lists, there are some email service
providers that work better than others based on pricing, functionality, and
what types of users they are targeting. For individual content creators,
artists, and musicians, I recommend ConvertKit (convertkit.com).
ConvertKit has a low price of entry, including a free plan, and offers tools
that allow creators to sell digital goods and services to their audience.
ConvertKit is what I use for my personal email list.
For small non-profit organizations, I recommend MailChimp.
MailChimp is easy for non-technical users to learn and send email with. It
also allows you to easily build opt-in forms to get people to sign-up for
your mailing list. It also has a free plan that allows you to build a list of
up to 2,000 subscribers for free. It also remains affordable after you
graduate from their free plan.
For e-commerce store owners, I recommend Klaviyo. Klaviyo was
built with e-commerce store owners in mind and can integrate with
popular e-commerce platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce.
Klaviyo can track sales generated from an individual email send and will
allow you to setup common automations used by e-commerce websites
such as abandoned cart emails.
For software developers needing an email API provider (EAP), I
recommend SendGrid. MarketBeat has used an enterprise plan from
SendGrid for years for its transactional email. We have had a great
experience working with their team growing our mail volume to more
than 300 million emails each month and we can’t say enough nice things
about them.
For small businesses that don’t meet any of the criteria above, I
recommend ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is a bit of a kitchen sink
email provider. It provides all the email marketing functionality that a
small business would need and then some. It’s not the cheapest email
service provider out there, but the cheapest option is rarely the best option
for a for-profit business.
If you just aren’t sure what email service provider to use, you may
consider signing up for other email lists in your category. You can usually
tell what email service provider someone is using by either looking at the
footer of their emails, their “thank you” page that appears after signing
up, or their cancellation page that shows up after clicking on their
“unsubscribe” link. If you see many other individuals or companies in
your space using the same email service provider, that is a good
indication that it is the right ESP for your business.
The recommended email service providers listed in this chapter are
companies that either I or someone that I know have used personally and
had a good experience with. Please note that I do not receive any affiliate
commissions or any other form of compensation for recommending the
email providers listed in this chapter.
Email Service Provider Costs
The ongoing monthly cost of using an email service provider will be
based primarily on the size of your mailing list and the frequency that you
email your list. When you are first getting started, several email service
providers offer a free tier that allows you to build a mailing list of a few
thousand subscribers before you must start paying an ongoing monthly
fee.
For example, Mailchimp allows you to build a list of 2,000
subscribers on their free tier. As your list grows to 10,000 subscribers,
you can expect to pay $50.00-$75.00 per month with most providers.
Your monthly fee will continue to grow as your list grows, but do
not let that be a major concern. Paying a large monthly email service
provider is the cost of success.
As of mid-2022, MarketBeat was paying about $22,000 per month
to SendGrid for a package that allows us to send 300 million emails
monthly. While the monthly fee is a big number, it is a small price to pay
given that email marketing generates more than ten million dollars in
annual revenue for our business.
Wrap-Up
Your email service provider will become the foundation of your
email marketing efforts. They will provide the software and network
infrastructure needed, so you do not have to focus on the technical
intricacies of sending out email at scale. With a high-quality ESP in
place, you can focus on growing your mailing list, writing marketing
content, and generating revenue from your list.
Action Steps:
Research and compare email service providers.
Select an email service provider and register for an account.
Become familiar with your email service provider’s software
platform.
CASE STUDY #1
MarketBeat
In early 2011, I founded MarketBeat (then called Analyst Ratings
Network), a financial media company that empowers individuals to make
better trading decisions by providing real‑time financial data and
objective market analysis. Prior to that, I had been running a financial
news website called American Banking and Market News, which
garnered more than one million page views per month and was generating
well into five figures of monthly advertising revenue.
While the business was doing well, it was heavily dependent upon
referral traffic from Google. They sent traffic to our website, and we sent
traffic back to their advertisers through Google’s AdSense program. This
is a great strategy as long as Google continued to send traffic. As every
entrepreneur that uses SEO as a marketing strategy has learned in the last
decade, that’s not ever guaranteed. I wanted my business to stand the test
of time, and to do this, I knew we would need to cultivate a loyal
audience of subscribers that kept coming back to MarketBeat as a trusted
source of information. We would also need to monetize their attention,
either by selling them products we produce or through advertising other
people’s products.
At the time, I wasn’t quite sure what we could sell to our audience,
but I knew that we would need to communicate with them in some way
other than hoping they would come back to the website every day. It
quickly became apparent to me that we needed to build an email list. We
added some opt-in forms to our website and started publishing a daily
financial newsletter that contains a wrap-up of the latest stock
recommendations from equities research analysts.
MarketBeat’s daily newsletter quickly found a product-market fit.
Investors get emotionally invested in the companies they are invested in
and want to stay up to date with the latest news and developments about
their stocks. We were able to compile thousands of news stories,
corporate events, and other financial data points and make them available
to investors in a convenient and real-time format.
After running our newsletter for about six months, we had attracted
our first 10,000 subscribers. At the same time, we were receiving requests
to add additional features and types of information to our newsletter. We
took the feedback from our subscribers and made a better version of the
newsletter called MarketBeat Daily Premium that would be available to
our subscribers for a monthly fee.
For $19.97 per month or $199.00 per year, subscribers could get
their newsletter delivered earlier in the day, receive SMS or email alerts
for their stocks, customize the look and feel of their newsletter, and set up
a watch list to get more news and information about the companies they
have invested in.
While MarketBeat has expanded to other communication channels
over the year, our free daily newsletter continues to serve as the core
communication point between the company and our subscribers. It is still
the primary lead magnet that our company uses and serves as an effective
tool to keep our subscriber base engaged with the content that we
produce.
MarketBeat’s subscribers love the up-to-the-minute financial news
and information that is included in our newsletter. In addition to keeping
our users engaged, we also use our daily newsletter to share news and
announcements from our company and send people back to our website.
The newsletter also generates revenue through cost-per-click ads that are
placed at the top and bottom of each newsletter.
We launched a suite of web-based investment research tools called
MarketBeat All Access in 2012. This higher-tier service includes
MarketBeat Daily Premium and gives users access to stock screeners,
proprietary research reports, a real-time news feed, and extended data
export tools so users can do their own analysis in Microsoft Excel.
MarketBeat All Access is available to investors for $39.97 per month or
$399.00 per year. MarketBeat All Access now accounts for two-thirds of
our recurring annual revenue.
Furthermore, we have been able to dramatically improve
MarketBeat’s opt-in rates over the years by continually split-testing our
opt-in forms and developing new and creative traffic sources. We attract
more than 50,000 organic opt-ins each month through our “login wall”
opt-in form, a Google One Tap opt-in, and opt-in forms integrated into
the various pages on our website. We use a lightweight and simple form
that automatically identifies typos and has a single call-to-action.
One big optimization win we had early on was to customize our
pop-up on a per page basis to reference the name of the company
discussed in the article. You can view MarketBeat’s current pop-up opt-in
form by navigating within your web browser to MarketBeat.com.
Since the initial publishing of this book, MarketBeat has had
significant success in growing its list through paid acquisition.
MarketBeat now spends over $300,000 per month to grow its email list.
We know that each email sign-up is worth about $7.50 in revenue to our
company over the course of two years. Since we can buy email sign-ups
from other investing websites for $2.00 to $3.00, increasing our
advertising budget was an easy decision.
MarketBeat utilizes several email marketing automation techniques.
The company has a 30-day autoresponder series that every new
subscriber receives. We also send specific campaigns to subscribers based
on the products and services they have or have not purchased. For our
paid products, we send out an engagement campaign to new customers
that shows them how to use the product they purchased. For subscribers
that haven’t opened a message in thirty days, we send a campaign to try
and get them re-engaged with our mailing list.
We utilize cart abandonment tools, which allow us to market to
subscribers that reviewed our sales page but didn’t purchase. We also
have campaigns that target individuals that had previously purchased our
product but have since cancelled. These narrowly targeted campaigns
have been incredibly effective at generating more sales and increasing the
lifetime value of each customer.
MarketBeat generates revenue from both premium subscriptions and
advertising. When I first launched the business, I expected most of the
revenue to come from selling premium subscriptions. Over the years,
MarketBeat’s advertising revenue has grown exponentially, and our
subscription growth has grown linearly. Advertising revenue now makes
up 80% of MarketBeat’s revenue and the company has really grown into
primarily being a media company that also operates a smaller
subscription products business.
MarketBeat has several different advertising channels, including
display advertising on the MarketBeat.com website, co-registration ads,
newsletter ads, dedicated email sends, SMS text blasts, and web push
notifications. Most of our ad inventory is sold directly to a variety of
financial advertisers including stock brokerages, publicly traded
companies looking for exposure, financial software providers, and
financial newsletter publishers. More information about MarketBeat’s
revenue streams is included in the monetization chapter of this book.
As of mid-2022, approximately 3 million investors subscribe to
MarketBeat’s daily newsletter, and we send more than 100 million
permission-based emails each month. Between MarketBeat.com and its
sister websites, we generate more than 10 million page views monthly.
MarketBeat generated more than $25 million in top-line revenue during
our last fiscal year.
CHAPTER TWO
Building Your Mailing List Through
Your Website
If your organization is going to develop a successful email
marketing program, you are going to need a consistent strategy to build
and grow your email list. One of the foundational elements of every listbuilding initiative should be collecting email opt-ins on your website.
People who are interested in your content are likely already visiting your
website on a regular basis. Since your website already has your
audience’s attention, it makes a lot of sense to use your website as one of
your primary means of gathering email sign-ups.
Lead Magnets
You should offer your subscribers something of perceived value in
exchange for signing up for your email list, such as a discount coupon, a
free report, or a resource list. In the world of email marketing, this is
known as a lead magnet. Many website visitors are hesitant to enter their
email address into an opt-in form on a website because of the perceived
risk of receiving more unwanted spam email. You need to develop a
compelling and valuable offer so that your potential subscribers will
desire your lead magnet enough to outweigh any potential fear of
receiving more unwanted email. Your subscribers know that their email
address is valuable to you, and you need to offer them something of equal
value in return.
A good lead magnet will help your website visitors learn a specific
skill, solve a specific problem, or accomplish a specific task. The content
of your lead magnet should be as closely correlated to the content on your
website as possible. If you have a website about mobile apps, you might
offer a list of 25 essential apps that everyone should download. If you
have a gardening website, you might offer a guide about the best plants to
grow in a specific climate. If you have a website that helps someone
study for a certification, you might offer a free downloadable study guide.
You may even consider creating multiple lead magnets for different
sections of your website, so that your lead magnets can be more closely
tied to the content on individual pages on your website. On a personal
finance site, you might have a home buying guide on your real-estate
content, a new investor check list on your investing content, and a coupon
book on your content about saving money. While creating multiple lead
magnets will take time, the additional work will significantly improve
your opt-in rates.
Types of Lead Magnets
Here are a few common varieties of lead magnets that are typically
offered in opt-in forms:
Free Report or Guide
Free reports are the most common type of lead magnet. It should
help your users learn about something they are interested in or help
them accomplish a specific goal. For example, if you had a website
about marketing, you might offer a free guide that helps people
create their first Facebook ad campaign. The content of your free
report should not otherwise be available on your website.
Resource List
A resource list is simply a list of products, services, tools, and
worksheets that will help your subscribers get started more quickly
with what you want to teach them. If you had a personal finance
blog, you might offer your subscribers a list of software budgeting
tools and resources to keep track of their money, ensure they have
the right kinds of insurance, and determine whether they are saving
enough for retirement.
Free Trial
If you run a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, you might
consider offering a 14-day or 30-day trial of your service as a lead
magnet. Offering a free trial will get users engaged in your SaaS
application and give you the opportunity to send them marketing
content via email.
Educational Videos
If you are good in front of a camera, you might record a series of
instructional videos using your webcam. You can also record a
screencast of an application, like Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft
Excel, to show users how to perform a specific task like removing
scratches from a photo in Photoshop or creating a pivot table in
Excel.
Downloadable Software
If your company or organization produces any kind of downloadable
software, you might consider requiring a user to enter their email
address to download your software.
Discounts or Free Shipping
E-commerce stores often offer a one-time use coupon for 10% or
20% off a customer’s first order as their lead magnet. While offering
a discount might lower the total price of a customer’s first order, it
will significantly increase the probability that a website visitor will
become a customer in the first place, because they will be receiving
email about your company’s products and services.
Catalog or Sales Material
If your company sells business-to-business services or offers a
product with a high price point, sending a product catalog or
additional sales materials can serve as an effective lead magnet.
Physical Products
If having a subscriber’s physical mailing address is important to you,
you can offer an inexpensive-to-produce physical product as your
lead magnet. Small tools such as flashlights, knives, and
screwdrivers are often used as physical product lead magnets. To
make up the cost of producing and mailing a physical product, you
can also charge a small shipping and handling fee that will generally
pay for both the product and the shipping. A good example of this is
the “free” credit card knife that SurvivalLife.com offered for years
for $4.95 shipping and handling. While they likely broke even on
their lead magnet, they acquire the email address, phone number,
and full mailing address of everyone that signed-up to receive a free
credit card knife.
Worksheets and Templates
If you are helping your subscribers achieve a specific task, you can
send them a Word document or Excel file that contains a worksheet
or template that helps them work through that task. For example, if
you had a website about sewing, you could send free patterns that
help your readers make a particular garment. If you are writing to
website designers, you could offer them a free proposal template.
Lead Magnet Examples
At MarketBeat, we use our free daily email newsletter as our
primary lead magnet. We set the expectation to our subscribers that they
are going to receive emails containing up-to-the-minute financial news
and stock recommendations daily. By setting this expectation in advance,
users will not be surprised by the relatively large volume of emails we
send out. Through this daily interaction we also can promote our
premium products in our newsletter and insert cost-per-click (CPC) ads
for advertisers. We have tested other types of lead magnets in the past,
but our daily newsletter has outperformed everything else we have tested.
When I was at USGolfTV, we used web-based training videos as our
lead magnets. A website visitor might opt in to receive a series of five
videos about how to improve their putting or how to fix their slice. They
had to verify their email address to receive the first video and would
receive an additional video each day for the following four days. After
the video series was complete, the subscriber would begin to receive our
weekly email newsletter and marketing content for USGolfTV’s premium
video training courses. The content in our lead magnets was often closely
related to our premium video products, which maid for a smooth
transition between sending our free video content and promoting our paid
products.
Many online clothing boutiques, including Filly Flair (fillyflair.com)
and Chelsea’s Boutique (chelseas.com), use discounts as their primary
lead magnets. Clothing boutiques recognize that their customers love
getting a good deal and have leveraged that reality in their lead magnets.
Chelsea’s Boutique offers a $10.00 discount to each new subscriber’s
next purchase. Filly Flair pops up a prize wheel that lets shoppers “spin”
to win a discount between 5% and 25% off their next order. By offering a
coupon to new subscribers, these boutiques are increasing the likelihood
that a customer will place another order quickly because they want to
make use of their coupon.
More Lead Magnet Ideas
If you are not sure what lead magnet will work best for your
website, there are many resources available online that offer specific
ideas for lead magnets. A Google search for “lead magnet ideas” will
return dozens of pages of articles that contain lead magnets you can
model. You can also check out the websites of some of your competitors
to see what kinds of lead magnets they are offering and get some more
industry-specific ideas.
Do not agonize over the task of creating a lead magnet. It does not
necessarily need to be long, complicated, or take a lot of work to create.
You may be able to repurpose a piece of content that you have already
created as your lead magnet, or even use a piece of content that someone
else has made. For example, I once used a free guide produced by the
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) as a lead magnet. Your
lead magnet can be as simple as a one-page report or a list of your
favorite tools and resources.
Regardless of what you choose as your lead magnet, remember that
it should be a piece of content valuable to your readers. It should be
closely related to the content on your website and should teach your
readers how to accomplish a specific task, learn a specific skill, or solve a
specific problem.
Messaging and Copy
After you have created your lead magnet, you will need to identify
what kind of messaging you are going to use to get your potential
subscribers to sign up for your mailing list. The language that you use on
your opt-in forms will have a dramatic impact on the number of email
sign-ups you receive. By creating a compelling and relevant offer and
using strong language with clear calls-to-action, you will get much higher
opt-in rates.
Before looking at opt-in form software, you will first need to write
the actual text (or copy) that will appear on your opt-in form. You will
need to write a short headline, which will be the first piece of text that a
potential subscriber reads. Then you need a description that provides
more detail about what the user can expect to receive when they give you
their email address. You will also need to decide what kind of information
to collect on your form and what you want on the text of your clickable
button.
Writing Your Headline
The headline on your opt-in form is the first piece of copy that your
potential subscribers will see and may be the most important words that
you write in your business. A good headline will create desire for your
lead magnet and encourage potential subscribers to read your opt-in
description.
In contrast, a bad headline will be quickly passed over and ignored.
It should be short, engaging, and briefly communicate what your website
visitors will receive if they sign up for your mailing list.
Typically, the best headlines are between five and ten words in
length and will ideally fit into a single line of text.
Here are some examples of headlines I have personally used:
10 Best Stocks to Own in 2023
Insiders are Selling Shares of Apple Stock – Why?
Get in on the $100 Trillion Green Revolution
Frustrated with Your Putting Skills?
Learn to Eliminate the “Blow-Up Hole” (free video!)
Add 20+ Yards to Your Drives Today!
Writing Your Description
The description on your opt-in form is the main copy that explains
your lead magnet, sets the expectation for the type of email your
recipients will receive, and provides an overall value proposition for why
someone might want to be on your mailing list.
Your description should be between 20 and 50 words in length, and
it should be clear and concise. Avoid unnecessary words and keep your
description as short as possible while fully explaining your value
proposition and setting a high expectation for the emails they will
receive. Finally, include a call-to-action which instructs readers to
complete the opt-in form.
Here is the opt-in description we use on MarketBeat to attract email
sign-ups:
Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary
of analysts’ upgrades and downgrades with MarketBeat’s FREE
daily email newsletter.
Selecting Your Button Text
The text on your sign-up button will be the shortest part of your optin that you write. Your button text may only be two or three words but
having the right text on your sign-up button can improve your opt-in rates
by 10-30%. Most websites use a very generic button text like “Submit,”
“Get Instant Access,” or “Subscribe Now.” Because web users are used to
clicking on buttons that say “Subscribe” and “Submit,” using a generic
button text will work reasonably well. We are currently using “Sign-Up
Now (Free)” as the text on MarketBeat’s buttons, which has
outperformed more than a dozen other variations we have tried.
You can also try creating a unique button text that ties into the copy
in your title and description. Instead of “Sign-Up Now” on MarketBeat,
we might test something like “Rate My Stock Portfolio” or “Send Me
Stock Ideas.” On a clothing website, you might test a button text of
“Show Me Outfits I’ll Love” or “Show Me The Latest Fall Styles.” Your
mileage may vary with creative button text, but they are worth testing.
Types of Opt-In Forms
Opt-in forms come in many different shapes and sizes and can be put
on many different places in your website’s layout. Some are small and
less intrusive, such as in a sidebar or below the fold of a website, but are
less likely to be seen by users. Others are larger, well-placed, and hard to
miss, and will generally get much better opt-in rates. As the use of opt-in
forms on websites has expanded in the last decade, several broad
categories of opt-in forms have been created by the Internet marketing
community.
Here are some common types of opt-in forms that are used on the
web today:
Entry Pop-up
This is a rectangular opt-in form that appears at the center of the
user’s screen when they first navigate to your website. Typically, the
rest of the web page will be dimmed to place an emphasis on the
opt-in form. Entry pop-ups will also usually contain an “X” or
“close” button that allows users to exit the opt-in form so they can
view the rest of the website. To avoid being overly intrusive, many
webmasters will only show a pop-up to their users the first time they
visit their website each week. Entry pop-ups are an extremely
effective tool to gather email opt-ins and often have rates three to
five times higher than an opt-in form in a sidebar or at the bottom of
an article.
Exit Pop-up
An exit pop-up operates very similar to an entry pop-up, but only
appears when the user has taken an action indicating they are getting
ready to leave a website. If a user’s mouse cursor leaves the main
window of your website or if a user clicks on a link, an exit pop-up
will appear. Webmasters sometimes choose exit pop-ups over entry
pop-ups because they are perceived as less obtrusive, but they are
also less visible than entry pop-ups because not all users leaving a
website will see an exit pop-up before moving on to another website.
Exit pop-ups also generally do not appear on smartphones and
tablets because these devices do not have a mouse cursor to track.
Welcome Page
A welcome page is an entry pop-up on steroids. A welcome page
will cover the user’s entire screen with a large opt-in form and
require them to click a close button or scroll down to see the
webpage that they are trying to access.
Login Wall
A login wall requires users to login or create an account after
visiting a certain number of pages on your website. Login walls
work well on news websites, tools-based websites, and websites
where users will commonly visit dozens of pages in a single session.
MarketBeat switched from an entry popup to a login wall in 2022
and immediately saw a 300% increase in opt-ins. Login walls can be
incredibly effective, but they might push away some users and they
also require custom coding to implement.
Footer Opt-In
A footer opt-in is simply an opt-in form that appears at the bottom of
an article. After a user is done reading an article on your website,
they are naturally ready to read another article or take another
action, such as signing up for your mailing list. Footer opt-in forms
can attract highly engaged subscribers, because every subscriber that
completes a footer opt-in has probably already read at least one
article on your website. Footer opt-ins are also very unobtrusive,
because they appear below the fold and only command a user’s
attention after they are reading an article. You can view an example
of a footer opt-in by reading any article located on
AmericanBankingNews.com.
Sidebar Opt-in
A sidebar opt-in is simply an opt-in form that appears in the sidebar
of your website. These often get lower opt-in rates than other types
because they are not in the main column of content that a user is
reading. This doesn’t mean that you should avoid sidebar opt-ins
altogether, because sidebar opt-ins can complement other forms on
your website. You can view an example of a sidebar opt-in by
visiting AmericanBankingNews.com.
Hello Bar
A hello bar is a wide, rectangular opt-in form that sits at the top or
bottom of your web browser. A hello bar will typically be about 50
pixels tall and span the entire width of your screen. Because of their
relatively small size, a hello bar will typically only have a headline,
a textbox for your email address, and a submit button. You can see
what a hello bar might look like on your website by using the demo
tool provided on HelloBar.com.
Scroll Box
A scroll box is a square or rectangular box that appears in the bottom
right corner of your website after a user scrolls down. A scroll box
will float above the rest of the content on your website and is
generally viewed as unobtrusive because they do not cover up the
main content of your website. You can view a demo of a scroll box
or add one to your website using the plugin produced by SumoMe at
sumome.com/app/scroll-box.
Sign in With Google
Many news-oriented websites now feature a small popup that allows
users to sign into the website with their Google account. The pop-up
only appears if a user is already signed into their Google account.
The pop-up shows the user’s Google account name, email address,
and profile picture. Users can click on their account to sign into the
website with one click. Integrating the “Sign in with Google” pop-up
requires custom software development work, but it is incredibly
effective as an opt-in mechanism because users can sign up for your
email list without having to enter their email address.
Which Opt-In Forms Work Best?
While there are several types of opt-in forms that you can place on
your website, some work much better than others. As a baseline, I
recommend implementing an entry pop-up and a footer opt-in form on
your website. The entry pop-up will be visible to everyone that visits your
website for the first time. The footer opt-in will catch the attention of
readers that have finished reading an article. If you want to be more
aggressive, you can also add a sidebar opt-in form to your website in
addition to the prior two suggestions. Using multiple opt-in forms on
your website will generate a higher opt-in rate than using any single optin form because users that miss your entry popup may sign up through
another opt-in form on your website.
Keep your opt-in forms simple to maximize their effectiveness. Use
the minimum amount of copy necessary in your headline and description
to ensure your potential subscribers will read all your copy. A simple and
consistent value proposition is the best route, because it lets users know
exactly what they are getting in exchange for their email address. While it
is tempting to try to collect a lot of information about your users up front
—such as their name, gender, and interests—your best bet is to only ask
for their email address on your opt-in form. Asking for additional
information beyond a user’s email address will make them less likely to
complete your opt-in form. You can always ask for additional personal
details later in your autoresponder series.
Your opt-in forms should have a good validation script to make sure
users are entering valid email addresses into your form. If a user doesn’t
enter an email address and tries to click the submit button, they should
receive an error message telling them they didn’t complete the required
field. If a user enters something that is not in the format of a valid email
address, they should receive a different message informing them of such.
If a user makes a common typo, such as indicating their email address is
from “@gmial.com” or “@hotmial.com”, your opt-in form should
automatically warn the user that they may have typed in their email
address wrong.
Ideally, your opt-in plugin will do these validation tasks for you. If
you are using a form that you created yourself or one a developer made
for you, you can use a script called MailCheck.js to automatically check
for erroneous emails at: github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck.
While I recommend using an entry popup, a footer opt-in form,
simple and clean copy, and minimal form elements, what works well for
my companies may not work equally well for yours. Your website will
have a different structure and audience than mine, so your mileage may
vary with the recommendations listed above. For this reason, it is
important to regularly test different messaging, lead magnets, and opt-in
form plugins to see if you can improve your opt-in rates. Consider the
recommendations listed above to be a good baseline until you find
something that works better for your website.
Worried about Annoying Your Users?
Some webmasters will refuse to place large and hard-to-miss opt-in
forms like pop-ups and welcome pages because they believe those types
of opt-in forms are obtrusive, annoying, and degrade the user’s overall
experience. Do not let any personal feelings or opinions you might have
stop you from using large opt-in forms. Remember that you are not your
users. Many technology enthusiasts think that all ads are annoying and
should be avoided, but that doesn’t mean that your potential subscribers
think the same.
Your subscribers may be glad that you have a large opt-in form that
appears when they first visit your website because they want your lead
magnet and other email content that you produce.
If you truly believe that a large opt-in form or a popup is too
annoying for your users, let the data do the talking. Run a split-test with
half of your website visitors seeing the opt-in form and the other half not
seeing the opt-in form at all. If the users who see the opt-in form visit the
same average number of pages on your website that users who do not see
the opt-in form do, you know the opt-in form is not driving any visitors
away from your website.
Common Opt-in Form Plugins and Services
To design and place opt-in forms on your website, you will most
likely need to make use of an opt-in form plugin or a cloud-based opt-in
form service. As email marketing has grown in popularity over the years,
several high-quality opt-in form plugins have been developed for
WordPress and every other major content management system. They will
provide templates that allow you to customize the look-and-feel of your
opt-in form and generate the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript necessary for
your opt-in forms to run. These plugins will also integrate with your
email service provider (ESP), so new sign-ups are automatically funneled
to your ESP.
Here are some of the most popular opt-in form plugins:
OptinMonster
OptinMonster (optinmonster.com) is a widely-used service that can
place many different types of opt-ins on your website. This service
integrates with all content management systems, has integrated splittesting functionality, and enables you to use custom messaging on a
per page or per category basis. OptinMonster works with nearly all
email service providers including MailChimp, AWeber, Keap,
Constant Contact, and 15 others. While OptinMonster is incredibly
flexible and feature-rich, it is one of the few services that charge an
ongoing monthly fee for its use. Depending on your level of traffic,
you will pay between $9.00 and $49.00 per month to use their
service.
Sumo List Builder
Sumo (sumo.com) offers a highly customizable list-building script
called List Builder that can be added to any website. List Builder
works either as an entry pop-up or exit pop-up and works with most
major email service providers. Sumo is a freemium service that
allows you to use their basic tools for free. They also have a
premium offering called Sumo Pro that costs $39.00 per month that
is geared toward high traffic websites.
HelloBar
HelloBar (hellobar.com) is a service that allows you to integrate a
hello bar, entry popup, scroll box, or welcome page on your website.
The look and feel of their forms are highly customizable and are
mobile friendly. HelloBar is a freemium service that offers basic
services for free with a variety of premium subscription tiers ranging
from $29.00 to $99.00 per month.
Popup Domination
Popup Domination (popupdomination.com) is a WordPress plugin
that will allow you to create entry and exit pop-ups on your website.
It features integrated A/B testing and analytics and allows you to
show different pop-ups on a per-page or per-category basis. Popup
Domination offers very visually appealing opt-in form templates that
are a step above many other opt-in form plugins. Popup Domination
works with all major email service providers and is available for an
annual fee of $54.00 per year to $174.00 per year.
Bloom
Bloom (elegantthemes.com/plugins/bloom) is a WordPress opt-in
plugin created by Elegant Themes. Bloom can add an entry pop-up,
footer opt-in form, or sidebar opt-in form to your website. It boasts
more than 100 customizable templates, has integrated A/B testing,
and works with nearly all major email service providers. Bloom is
available as part of Elegant Themes’ membership program, which
costs $89.00 per year.
WPForms
WPForms (wpforms.com) is a drag and drop WordPress form
builder that allows users to create contact forms, payment forms,
newsletter opt-in forms. WPForms is known for its simple user
interface allowing non-developers to build great-looking opt-in
forms. WPForms integrates with most email service providers and
has subscription tiers ranging from $39.50 to $299.50 per year.
Which Opt-In Plugin Is Best?
There are dozens of different opt-in form plugins that you can
choose from. While it would be nice to recommend an opt-in form plugin
that is ideally suited to everyone, there is no one-size-fits-all plugin that
works for everyone in every situation. Some opt-in form plugins and
services are specific to a single content management system, such as
WordPress or Drupal. Other opt-in plugins only create certain types of
opt-in forms, such as landing pages, exit pop-ups, or entry pop-ups.
I recommend looking at the marketing material for all the opt-in
plugins previously listed and find one that meets your specific needs. If
your website runs WordPress, you will have several different opt-in form
plugins to choose from. If your website is powered by another platform,
you can use a cloud-based opt-in form service such as SumoMe,
OptinMonster, or HelloBar.
Special Considerations for Opt-in Forms
Make sure that the opt-in form you select doesn’t negatively impact
the load speed of your website. Some opt-in plugins are written much
more efficiently than others. If your opt-in plugin noticeably slows down
how fast your website loads, you should probably switch to a different
plugin or service.
You can test the impact of your opt-in form plugin on your website’s
load speed using a tool called GTMetrix (gtmetrix.com). Test your
website first before installing your opt-in form and test it again after
putting your opt-in form in place. If the addition of your opt-in software
slows down your website’s load speed by more than a second, it probably
wasn’t written very efficiently.
In special situations, it may be better to have a custom opt-in form
created by a front-end web developer. I personally do not use any thirdparty opt-in plugins on my websites. A while back, I hired a developer to
create a lightweight, custom opt-in form on my website that would work
as an entry popup, a footer opt-in form, and a sidebar opt-in form. By
having a custom script written, I was able to reduce the file size of the
opt-in script from about 150KB to about 12KB. This significantly
improved my website’s load speed. I was also able to integrate better
form validation through MailCheck.js and KickBox (kickbox.io) than
was available with the off-the-shelf plugin I was using previously.
However, it will not make sense for you to have a custom opt-in script
created by a web developer when you are first getting started because you
need a simpler option.
Many large websites still use off-the-shelf opt-in plugins. However,
if you have a very popular website, need some custom functionality
added to your opt-in form, or are very concerned about the load speed of
your website, it may then make sense to use a custom opt-in form created
by a web developer.
How Many Opt-Ins Can I Expect?
Asking how many opt-ins you should expect to receive on your
website is one of the most common questions I hear from new email
marketers. The volume of opt-ins that you can expect will be totally
dependent on how much traffic your website receives, the quality of that
traffic, and the effectiveness of your opt-in forms.
If you are getting 20,000 page views per month on your website, you
are probably going to receive twice as many opt-ins than you would if
you only had 10,000 page views per month. If most of your visitors come
to your website from search engines and other websites like yours, you
are likely going to get better opt-in rates, because people doing searches
and looking at websites similar to yours are either doing research or are
generally more engaged than people that wander onto your website from
social media or unrelated websites. Working to attract a steadily growing
stream of high-quality traffic is the single best way to set yourself up to
build a large mailing list.
The size, number, design, content, and placement of your opt-in
forms will have a significant impact on your opt-in rate. When you are
first getting started with email marketing, you will not have any idea what
combination of lead magnets, messaging, and opt-in forms will yield the
highest opt-in rates.
Your best bet is to start with the practices I have outlined earlier in
this chapter and do a few dozen split-tests over time to determine if there
are ways that you can improve your opt-in rates from the baseline that I
recommend.
A highly effective set of opt-in forms on a website with good traffic
sources might yield an opt-in rate of 4-5%. A less effective set of opt-in
forms on the same website might only command an opt-in rate of 0.5%.
There is no industry standard for what opt-in rates you should expect, so
do not beat yourself up if you get low rates for the first few months of
your email marketing efforts. Instead, focus on whether your opt-in rates
are improving every month.
Let’s say that during the first month of your email marketing
initiative that you get 20,000 page views and 200 opt-ins. You had an optin rate of 1%. During the second month, your website attracts a bit more
traffic and receives 25,000 page views. You set up a highly effective popup opt-in form, and you receive 500 opt-ins. Your opt-in rate grew to 2%
during the second month. During the third month, your traffic stays flat at
25,000 page views, but you identify a highly effective lead magnet, and
you attract 750 new opt-ins. Your opt-in rate just grew to 3%. By making
a series of improvements and running a series of split-tests, your opt-in
rates will slowly improve over time.
What If My Website Doesn’t Get Much Traffic?
If you are just getting started and your website is not getting much
traffic yet, you should still place opt-in forms on your website. It takes
time to create a popular website and build a large mailing list. You may
only get 50 or 100 opt-ins per month for the first several months of
operating your website, and that’s okay. Your total list size will continue
to grow as weeks and months go on. As new subscribers sign up, your list
will grow like a snowball rolling down a hill. Before you know it, you
will have a few thousand people on your mailing list that want to receive
email from you on a regular basis.
While growing the amount of traffic your website receives is beyond
the scope of this book, there are several great resources available that can
teach you how to build a popular website. The book Traction by Gabriel
Weinberg provides an overview of 19 different marketing channels you
can use to grow your business and get more people onto your website.
There are several books in the “For Dummies” series that teach traffic
generation concepts, such as search engine optimization, social media
marketing, and Facebook marketing. DigitalMarketer.com and
SmartMarketer.com both produce courses and other resources that show
you how to attract more web traffic. If you are not sure what marketing
channels you should pursue initially, you can use SimilarWeb
(similarweb.com) to see where some of your competitors are currently
getting their traffic from.
Split-Testing Your Opt-in Forms
The key to getting great opt-in rates is regularly running tests to
determine if making changes to your forms will increase the percentage
of people that complete them. To do this, identify one change to your
forms that might improve your opt-in rates. Show half of your website’s
visitors the original version of your opt-in form and show the new
variation you created to the other half. Your opt-in form software’s splittesting capability will be able to handle the 50-50 split for you without
having to write any code. Wait until about 300 more people complete
your opt-in form.
If the two versions are equally effective, they should both receive
about 150 opt-ins. If your variation gets 175 opt-ins and your original
opt-in form only gets 125, you know that the change you made likely
improved your opt-in rates. On the other hand, if the original opt-in form
gets more opt-ins than the variation, you know that the split-test didn’t
work, and you should stick with your original opt-in form.
Every aspect of your opt-in forms can and should be tested. You
might find that an entry pop-up works better than an exit pop-up. You
might find that adding a second opt-in form to your website improves
your opt-in rates. You can test changing the language in your headline,
description, and button text. You can test a different lead magnet to see if
it better resonates with your subscribers. You can even try changing the
colors and fonts in your opt-in forms. Remember, however, that you
should only test one change on your website at a time. If you make
multiple changes at once, you will not know which changes are helping
your opt-in rates and which are hurting them.
If your website doesn’t receive a lot of opt-ins, it may take a while
for you to run a statistically valid split-test. If you only receive 100 optins each month, it is going to take you several months to identify a clear
winner. Because you can’t run as many split-tests when you are first
getting started, you should put significantly more thought into the
changes that you evaluate. Start with big changes, such as re-writing your
headline or trying a different lead magnet. Only test smaller changes like
colors and button text after you have thoroughly exhausted the more
visible aspects of your opt-in form.
You will eventually reach a point where your opt-in forms are
homed in, and you start to see diminishing returns on your split-testing
efforts. This does not mean you should stop testing altogether. The
effectiveness of different types of lead magnets and opt-in forms will
change over time as web users’ behaviors change. If you had a highly
optimized set of opt-in forms three years ago and haven’t done any splittesting since then, it is probably time to start testing new lead magnets,
new messaging, and new types of opt-in forms.
Creating Your “Thank You” Page
The page that users are redirected to after they sign up for your
mailing list is often referred to as a “thank you” page, because it usually
contains a message that thanks a subscriber for signing up for a mailing
list. A “thank you” page will also often contain next steps that the user
should take, such as clicking a link in a confirmation email or checking
out other content produced on your website. On most websites, there
generally is not much content on a “thank you” page other than a brief
message welcoming people to their mailing list.
Most webmasters do not realize that their “thank you” page is an
incredibly valuable piece of advertising real estate. A user that lands on
your “thank you” page after opting in has already indicated they are
interested in your content and have taken a specific action to receive
more of it. They are much more likely than other users to take another
action, such as signing up for a free trial of a premium service, clicking
on a banner ad, or opting into another mailing list through a coregistration advertising unit.
While you might make $10.00 in ad revenue for every 1,000 people
that read an article on your website, you can make between $100.00 and
$750.00 for every 1,000 new subscribers that land on your “thank you”
page. For specific information about how to monetize your “thank you”
page, read the monetization chapter of this book.
Wrap-Up
Implementing good opt-in forms on your website is your first step to
building a large and profitable email list. Collecting opt-ins from your
website should be the core of your list-building efforts. While other listbuilding strategies might require an upfront cash investment, subscribers
that opt-in through your website are effectively free. Spend sufficient
time writing compelling copy, create a highly desirable lead magnet, and
implement an opt-in form plugin, and your mailing list will grow steadily
over time.
Action Steps:
Develop a lead magnet to offer to new subscribers.
Write the messaging (copy) that you want to use on your opt-in
forms.
Pick which opt-in form plugin or service you want to use on your
website.
Set up your opt-in form plugin and connect it to your email service
provider (ESP).
Place your opt-in forms on your website and verify that they are
working.
Set up a split-test to try to improve your opt-in rates.
CASE STUDY #2
SignWell
SignWell (signwell.com) is a “software as a service” (SaaS)
company founded by Ruben Gamez that helps businesses get their
documents electronically signed. SignWell focuses on making electronic
signatures easy and convenient, cutting down on turnaround time. It’s
currently used by over 61,000 (paid and free) users for legally compliant
electronic signatures. SignWell is also SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA
compliant.
With hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors to its website, email
marketing is an important tool for SignWell to turn many of those leads
into customers. While SignWell leverages its freemium offering for
distribution and signups through its viral loop (document signers convert
to become document senders), contract templates are used to attract
important leads. These leads are drafting agreements that will eventually
need to be signed. Free contract templates serve as lead magnets that
indirectly attract the right type of visitors that eventually sign up to
SignWell.
In addition to getting a free template, many people opt-in to a 30-day
drip campaign focused on avoiding pitfalls and mistakes in legal
agreements. These educational emails include information on how
SignWell can make document signing easier and more convenient, along
with calls-to-action to try the tool for free.
This strategy is similar to a strategy that Gamez previously used to
attract email subscribers for another SaaS product that he owns,
Bidsketch. Bidsketch (Bidsketch.com) makes it easy for businesses to
create client proposals in minutes.
While both SaaS products use templates as a primary distribution
strategy, Gamez was surprised to learn that less than 5% of visitors were
opting into SignWell’s drip campaign. Using a combination of exit intent
surveys, HotJar surveys, and even phone calls with anonymous visitors,
he was able to figure out what was holding back visitors from opting in.
This information was used to increase the opt-in conversion rates to over
20%.
Phone calls with anonymous visitors were key. Gamez said during
an interview that “People think that you only get on the phone with leads
or customers. The truth is, even if you’re not going to immediately see
direct ROI from a phone call with someone, it pays long term to do
whatever it takes to get an important lead funnel working. In this case,
nothing we tried worked, so that meant I had to talk to some of these
anonymous visitors to find out what was happening.”
Using this free template strategy, SignWell attracts 15,000 new
email subscribers each month as of June 2022. Gamez says that he can
attribute 20% of the company’s customers directly to email marketing. He
closed by saying, “Email marketing has always been an important tool in
our acquisition strategy. What we have in place is just the start, there’s a
lot more we’ll be testing and trying in the future.”
CHAPTER THREE
16 Ways to Grow Your Mailing List
Independently of Your Website
Building your mailing list through your website will allow you to
steadily collect opt-ins and grow your list over time. If you want to
accelerate how fast your list is growing, you can make use of some of
these alternative strategies that work independently of the traffic your
website normally receives.
While sign-ups through your website will happen automatically once
plugins are set up, the strategies listed below will require either a
financial investment or a steady investment of your time and energy. Do
not let this scare you off. Paid acquisition strategies can be some of the
most consistent and profitable ways of making money through email
marketing. For example, let’s say that you can make $10.00 in revenue
from each email subscriber on your mailing list. If you could acquire a
new email sign-up for $2.00, you would buy as many of those leads as
are available because it is better than any other investment you can make.
If you put $2.00 in the stock market, you will be lucky if you get a 10%
return on that investment in one year, and it turns into $2.20. If you pay
$2.00 to acquire an email address and can make $10.00 off it over the
course of the following year, that is a return on investment of 500%. If
you have a well-honed conversion funnel, spending money to acquire
email sign-ups can be one of the most profitable investments you can
make.
Try Co-Registration Advertising
Co-registration advertising networks allow you to advertise on other
websites’ “thank you” pages. After someone signs up for a mailing list on
a website that is running a co-registration ad unit, they will be presented a
list of offers from third-party advertisers (like you). If the subscriber
selects your offer and presses the submit button, the advertising network
will provide you the subscriber’s contact information to add to your
mailing list through an API call or by periodically sending you a
spreadsheet of new sign-ups. You can expect to pay $0.50-$3.00 per signup through a co-registration ad network.
You can see an example of a co-registration ad unit below:
The quality of the sign-ups that you receive from co-registration
advertising will vary depending on the sites that your ad is running on.
When working with a co-registration ad network, I recommend asking for
a list of sites that they have available for you to advertise on. Only agree
to place your ads on websites that are similar to yours or are in the same
industry. Subscribers that come from unrelated websites are less likely to
be engaged with your content and will be less likely to purchase anything
from you.
The quality of leads can also vary among multiple sites in the same
industry. One site may send subscribers that connect well with your
content, and another may send subscribers that are not engaged with your
content and are of no value to you.
Given the ongoing cost of running a co-registration advertising
campaign and the disparity of lead quality on a site-to-site basis, you will
want to monitor performance on a per-ad-network and per-website basis
every month. Are the subscribers that came from a particular website’s
co-registration ad unit as engaged as users that sign up through your
website? Are they opening emails at the same rate as other subscribers?
Are they clicking on links? Are they buying products and services from
you at the same rate as other subscribers? While running a co-registration
advertising campaign can be incredibly profitable, you must monitor your
campaign’s performance regularly to weed out underperforming websites
and ad networks.
Co-registration advertising is more prominently used in some
industries than others. You will frequently see these units on financial
websites, sports websites, travel websites, business opportunity websites,
and disaster preparation websites. While you can run a co-registration
advertising campaign for a website in just about any niche, it works better
for some industries than others.
Here are some of the largest co-registration advertising networks:
After Offers
After Offers (afteroffers.com) works with advertisers and publishers
with travel websites, financial websites, Internet business websites,
and survival/disaster preparation websites.
CoregMedia
CoregMedia (coregmedia.com) is a general co-registration
advertising network that works with publishers and advertisers in a
large number of industries. CoregMedia advertises that it works with
many major advertisers like Kohl’s, Nokia, Gap, Dish Network, Red
Lobster, and Wal-Mart.
Fluent
Fluent (fluentco.com) is a lead-generation company that provides
co-registration leads to a wide variety of industries. They primarily
offer low-cost leads for products and services that would be relevant
to a broad set of lower and middle income consumers.
Investing Media Solutions
Investing Media Solutions (investingmediasolutions.com) works
with advertisers and publishers that operate financial websites.
Opt-Intelligence
Opt-Intelligence (opt-intelligence.com) is one of the largest coregistration advertising platforms online. Opt-Intelligence works
with many major advertisers and publishers in a wide variety of
industries.
Tiburon Media
Tiburon Media (tiburonmedia.com/index.html) is a general coregistration advertising network that works with several major
companies including Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco, Dell, Disney, and
Toyota.
Lead Generation Services
Lead generation services, such as Fluent (fluentco.com) and Lead
Pulse (leadpulsemedia.com), share many similarities with co-registration
advertising services. They also allow you to pay a fixed fee to receive an
email sign-up for your mailing list, but their leads tend to be much less
expensive and much less targeted than leads that come from more
traditional co-registration providers. You can purchase leads from these
services for as little as $0.40 per sign-up, but the email sign-up will come
from a generic offer funnel or survey site rather than another website in
your industry.
Lead generation providers tend to have much greater scale than coregistration advertising networks. They have much more inventory and
often rely on paid ad-spend themselves to generate leads, which allows
them to generate massive lead volume for their advertisers. If you wanted
to, you could purchase 100,000 new subscribers per month or more
through lead generation providers.
Adding thousands of email sign-ups from a lead generation service
can negatively impact your deliverability because leads from these
services are untargeted and a significant percentage of leads will never
open any of your messages. To prevent this, you need to actively remove
unengaged email subscribers from your mailing list. We remove anyone
that signs-up for MarketBeat through a lead generation service that does
not open an email within the first 21 days of their subscription. This
keeps our email engagement rates where they need to be to keep email
service providers such as Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo happy.
You also need very good tracking and analytics tools to measure
return on investment (ROI) from leads from these services to determine if
you are running a profitable campaign. We do a cohort analysis to
measure the ROI for all the subscribers that register from a given lead
source in each month. Our goal is to break even on advertising spend
from lead generation services in 90-days. If it’s April and our leads from
January have broken even or shown a profitable ROI, we know that we
are hitting our target performance goals.
It’s also important to note that the quality of leads will vary
significantly from one lead generation provider to another. MarketBeat
has experimented with several lead generation services over the years
with mixed results. We would often find that a campaign would be
profitable for the first several months, only to become unprofitable after
all the leads in the lead generation provider’s database had seen our offer.
As of the publication of the third edition of this book in 2022,
MarketBeat is not currently utilizing any lead-generation services but will
likely test them again in the future.
Lead generation services can be a very powerful tool given the
ability to generate a massive volume of email sign-ups at an affordable
price, but they can also be dangerous given the deliverability risks. Lead
generation services are effectively the gasoline of email marketing. They
can either add significant scale to your email marketing efforts or they
can blow up in your face. If you have a clear understanding of your
funnel and have learned a lot about deliverability, pursuing leads from
lead generation providers can be a good idea. If you are just beginning to
learn about email marketing, you should pursue other sign-up methods.
Swap Email Sends with Other Mailing List Owners
If you have built up a mailing list of a few thousand subscribers,
swapping email sends with other mailing list owners can be an extremely
effective way to grow your mailing list. When you do an email swap, you
will send a marketing email to your subscribers on behalf of another
website, and they will send an email that you write to their mailing list.
The email that you send to your email swap partner’s list should
attempt to get their subscribers to sign-up for your mailing list. Your
email should offer their subscribers a lead magnet that they can opt-in to
receive. It should describe what they will receive if they opt-in and have
several links to your landing page where you collect email opt-ins. If you
do not have a landing page dedicated to collecting email sign-ups on your
website, create one now.
Note that you should never send your actual mailing list to your
email swap partner, and they should never send their actual mailing list to
you. Your swap partner will send out your email to their subscribers, and
you will send out your swap partner’s message to yours. Your mailing list
should be treated like classified information. It should never be given to
any third party under any circumstances. You do not know what kind of
spam an unscrupulous partner might send to your list, so it is best to keep
that information under tight wraps.
To find email swap partners, make a list of as many websites as you
can that are similar to yours. Review your list and remove any websites
that do not have opt-in forms on them. It is unlikely that a website has a
mailing list if they are not actively soliciting opt-ins. If possible, try to
make a list of 50 different websites that you could potentially swap email
sends with. Go through your list and send an introductory email to each
website’s owner that provides some background information about you
and your website. Tell them that you are actively seeking for other
websites to do email swaps with. Ask if they have a mailing list and if
they would be interested in doing a swap with your list. Since email
swaps are generally a no-lose proposition for both parties, you will find
that many other webmasters are more than happy to do email swaps with
you.
If you want to streamline the process of finding email swap partners,
you can use a service called Safe Swaps (safe-swaps.com) to locate
webmasters who are interested in doing email swaps with other mailing
list owners. Safe Swaps is a paid service that costs $29.95 per month to
use.
Email List Rentals
If you have a sizable advertising budget to grow your mailing list,
you can pay other mailing list owners to email their list on your behalf.
Email list rentals work like email swaps. Instead of repaying the list
owner by mailing your list on their behalf, you will pay them a negotiated
fee for the privilege of their mailing list. Afterwards, you will create an
email that contains an offer for a lead magnet and a link to sign up for
your mailing list. The list owner then sends the promotional email to their
mailing list on a set date and time for the agreed-upon fee.
Historically, email list rentals would be sold on a cost per thousand
(CPM) basis. This means if you wanted to email 10,000 subscribers on
someone else’s mailing list and they charged a $25.00 CPM, you would
pay a $250.00 fee. In more recent years, email list rentals have moved in
a pay-per-performance direction where an advertiser pays the email list
owner based on the number of clicks or the number of email sign-ups
they receive from the promotion. For example, MarketBeat might pay
another investing email list $3.00 per click or $10.00 per email sign-up to
promote one of our lead magnets. Which of these two pricing methods is
the best deal for us will vary depending on a variety of factors, including
who the publisher is and what their audience interest is in our lead
magnet.
Prices for email list rentals can vary depending on what industry or
niche the mailing list is in. For example, emailing a list of investors will
cost much more than emailing a list of computer gamers, because selling
products to investors is much more profitable. For lower-end categories
of mailing lists, you might be able to rent an email list for $10.00-$20.00
CPM. For high-end categories of mailing lists, you might pay
$50.00-$100.00 CPM to email someone else’s list.
In the Internet marketing space, you might see email list rentals
referred to as “solo ads.” In other spaces, you might see email list rentals
referred to as “dedicated email sends” or “advertising email blasts.” Do
not let this throw you off. “Solo ads,” “advertising email blasts,” and
“dedicated email sends” are just another name for email list rentals.
There are several online databases that advertise email lists available
for rent. NextMark (nextmark.com) is probably the largest online
database of email, phone, and snail mail mailing lists with more than
60,000 mailing lists available for rental. Unfortunately, their search tool is
a bit antiquated, so you may have to comb through several pages of
results to find a list that you want to email.
A wide range of quality exists among email list rental providers.
Since you never actually see the provider’s subscriber list, there is no way
to independently verify the size or quality of their mailing list. While
many email list rental providers are professional and completely above
board, there are some unscrupulous providers that try to pass off
compiled lists, purchased lists, and unrelated mailing lists as a highquality and relevant list available for rental. Because of the level of trust
involved, you should only work with very reputable mailing list owners.
If possible, consider using an agency that works with advertisers in your
industry to do email list rentals. A good email advertising agency will
already have relationships with mailing list owners in your industry and
can mitigate the possibility of working with dishonest mailing list
owners.
Do Not Buy a Mailing List
While renting an email list is a commonly accepted practice in the
email marketing industry, buying an email list is not advisable. When
renting a list, you are paying a list owner to email their list on your
behalf. You are effectively borrowing the permission that their
subscribers have given the list owner to email them. While there is
nothing that’s necessarily illegal or immoral about purchasing a mailing
list, generally it’s a bad idea because individuals on a purchased list have
not opted in and have not given you permission to email them.
Using purchased email lists to get customers is usually not a very
effective marketing strategy. Most email lists available for sale are lowquality, out-of-date, and are not maintained very well. People on these
lists won’t find your content engaging and won’t want to receive your
emails. More importantly, they are very unlikely to buy anything from
you or respond to any of your offers.
Many email service providers (ESPs) will not let you use a
purchased list with their services because of the damage that mailing a
purchased list can do to the reputation of your domain name and IP
address. Emailing purchased lists usually results in an unacceptably large
number of spam complaints and undeliverable emails. This runs the risk
of your domain name and IP address being added to a blacklist, which
causes your future mailings to end up in subscribers’ spam folders or not
be delivered at all. To maintain your reputation, your best bet is to only
email people that have directly given you permission to do so.
Make Your Email Content Shareable
If you publish an email newsletter, place social media sharing
buttons and a “forward to a friend” link in each of your newsletters.
These buttons will encourage your current email subscribers to share and
forward your email content to their friends and other people in their
social networks, giving you new connections and access to potential new
subscribers. You can also consider placing a call-to-action at the bottom
of your newsletter with a link to subscribe, which will encourage anyone
who received a forwarded copy of your newsletter to sign up for your
mailing list. Most email service providers include tools to make your
email content shareable, so it shouldn’t require much work to add social
sharing and “forward to a friend” links to your emails.
Archive Email Content on Your Website
Whenever you publish an email newsletter or another piece of
informational or educational content, post a copy of that email into an
archive of newsletter content on your website. If you are using
WordPress, this might mean creating a new category for newsletter
content and publishing any new newsletter content as a post in that
category. Whenever you add a new email newsletter to the archive, share
it on all of your available social media channels. This will broaden the
reach of your email content and make it visible to followers not already
on your email list. It will also provide a second way for your subscribers
to see your new content if they happen to miss your email. Google and
other search engines will also index the archive of newsletter content on
your website, which may also increase the quantity of organic search
traffic that you receive.
Own a Physical Store?
If you own a physical store or have any other kind of retail location,
ask every customer if they want to sign up for your email list at checkout.
You can ask each customer something like, “Would you like to sign up
for our mailing list and periodically get coupons in your email?” If the
customer says yes, have them write down their email address on a sign-up
sheet on a clipboard. At the end of each day, add these customers to your
mailing list. Some modern point-of-sale systems will streamline this
process by asking your customers if they want to sign-up for your email
list at checkout and then sending the customer’s email address on to your
email service provider.
Leverage Your Email Signature
Adjust your and your employees’ email signatures so they contain a
call-to-action and a link to sign up for your mailing list.
Here’s a simple email signature with a call-to-action that I have used
in the past:
Matthew Paulson
To: subscriber@marketbeat.com
Subject: Signature Example
–––Matthew Paulson
Founder and CEO, MarketBeat
Want the latest news and updates about MarketBeat?
Sign-Up for Our Newsletter Here
Run a Contest or Giveaway
Find something of high-perceived value that you can use as a
giveaway or a contest prize, like an iPad or an iPhone. Require everyone
participating in the contest to sign up for your mailing list to enter the
contest. Promote the contest through your personal and company social
media channels, as well as any other marketing channels you might have
available. Remember to add social sharing buttons to the contest page on
your website, so it is easily shareable.
Social Media Offers
Develop a high-value lead magnet or another offer, such as an
eBook or free report, and share it on all your available social media
channels. Require that users enter their email address to access the lead
magnet or other offered item.
Make sure you use every social media channel you have available,
including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and
other social media profiles that you have set up. Share the offer through
both your personal social media accounts and any profiles for your
business. Share the offer multiple times over the course of a few weeks
for maximum exposure.
YouTube Calls to Action
If you or your company have a YouTube channel, add calls-to-action
in the description of your videos to subscribe to your mailing list. Include
hyperlinks in video description that direct viewers to a landing page on
your website where users can opt-in to your mailing list or respond to
another offer.
You can also create a short and memorable URL that you can share
at the end of your videos. At the end of each of your video, you could say
something along the lines of “If you would like to get more news and
updates from MarketBeat, sign-up for our email list at
marketbeat.com/ratings/newsletter.”
Set Up Google AdWords
If you have money to invest in your list-building campaign, you can
use Google AdWords to drive traffic to a landing page, where users can
enter their email address in exchange for a lead magnet or another offer.
Make sure you use the conversion tracking pixel that Google provides to
identify which keywords and ads are driving the most opt-ins.
After your campaign has been running a while, you can use
Google’s cost-per-action (CPA) bidding to optimize for email sign-ups.
AdWords also has an extension that allows advertisers to place an opt-in
form directly in search results, but that feature is currently only available
to a select group of publishers. While creating a Google AdWords
campaign is beyond the scope of this book, I recommend reading
Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords by Perry Marshall and Mike Rhodes
if you want to learn how to create a Google AdWords campaign.
For many years, MarketBeat did not have an active Google
AdWords campaign because the cost per lead was significantly higher
than other paid acquisition sources. In the past year, we found success
with Google AdWords by hiring a media buyer with relevant industry
experience who helped us create an effective lead magnet and landing
page, and also run our AdWords campaign. You can view an example of
our AdWords landing pages at marketbeat.com/newsletter/pdfoffer.aspx.
Presenting at a Trade Show?
If your organization is presenting at a trade show, you have a prime
opportunity to gather new email sign-ups. Run a giveaway and offer a
highly desirable prize. Consumer electronics such as iPads, Kindles, and
video game systems work great as prizes. Allow attendees to enter your
drawing by dropping their business card into a fishbowl. You will need to
make it clear that contest participants are signing up for your mailing list.
At the end of the conference, pick a winner and then add all
participants to your mailing list. Send a welcome email to every new
mailing list member. Your welcome email should remind them about the
contest, why they have been added to your mailing list, and provide
information about your products and services. You should also include an
opt-out link in your welcome email so that anyone who doesn’t want to
receive email from you can easily unsubscribe.
Many trade shows give you the opportunity to either scan attendee
badges or outright purchase the event’s attendee list. While I generally
advise against purchasing email lists, buying a conference attendee list
can be an effective marketing strategy. You should not immediately add
attendees to your main mailing list, but you can send them a few emails
inviting them to opt-in to your mailing list, perhaps in exchange for a lead
magnet.
Put QR Codes in Your Print Marketing Material
If your business makes use of print marketing material, add a QR
code that users can easily scan with their phones. Use the code to redirect
users to a mobile-friendly landing page on your website where you can
ask them to opt-in to your mailing list. You can easily create a QR code
using any number of websites that offer free generators, such as qr-codegenerator.com. Also include a short URL that redirects to your mobilefriendly landing page directly below the QR code. Not everyone has a QR
code scanner on their phone, and it may be easier for them to simply type
a URL into their smartphone’s web browser or write it down for later use.
Add a Facebook Page Call-To-Action
If your organization has a Facebook business page set up, you can
add a call-to-action button on the header of your Facebook page to attract
email sign-ups. To create a call-to-action button on your organization’s
Facebook page, navigate to your page, and click the “Create Call to
Action” button in the header of your page. You can choose between a
number of button texts including “book now,” “contact us,” “use app,”
“play game,” “shop now,” “sign up,” and “watch video.” I personally
recommend using “sign up” because it’s simple and it tends to convert
well. You will also be asked to provide the URL where users can then add
themselves to your mailing list. The URL should be a landing page that
introduces your mailing list and a form so users can easily sign up.
How to Create a Landing Page to Collect Opt-Ins
Throughout this chapter, there are several strategies that discuss
sending traffic to a landing page to collect email addresses. A landing
page is a single purpose webpage that exists solely to persuade users to
take a specific action, such as completing an opt-in form or purchasing a
product. While the process of building a landing page is beyond the scope
of this book, I do want to provide a couple of basic tips and point you to
some resources that can help you create landing pages for your business.
Don’t try to create a landing page using raw HTML or have a
landing page created by a professional web designer. There are several
great tools available including LeadPages (leadpages.com), Unbounce
(unbounce.com), and Click Funnels (clickfunnels.com) that make
creating landing pages simple. Most of them have drag-and-drop
interfaces which allow you to put a great landing page together in a short
amount of time. These services will also integrate with your email service
provider (ESP) so your sign-up form works without any coding on your
part.
Remember that the only thing on your landing page should be your
opt-in form. That means no sidebars, navigation, or any other extraneous
content. It should have a title, a bit of sales and marketing content, maybe
a video, and your actual opt-in form. Always keep the focus on the single
action you want your subscribers to take. When you add additional
content to your landing pages, users are more likely to be distracted and
are less likely to take the indicated action.
For more tips and recommendations about how to put a landing page
together, Unbounce has compiled a resource titled “101 Landing Page
Optimization Tips”14 which provides detailed instructions on how to
create landing pages that work. This resource can be accessed at
unbounce.com/101-landing-page-optimization-tips.
The Importance of Continually Growing Your List
Even if you have a large mailing list with tens of thousands of
subscribers, you should continuously work on growing your email list. A
small percentage of your users will unsubscribe from your mailing list
every month because they lose interest in the topic area you write about,
or they simply no longer want to receive your emails. There will also be
some subscribers whose email addresses are no longer valid, because they
switched ISPs or moved to a new email address.
You will need to continually attract new subscribers to your mailing
list to replace those that drop off over time. Additionally, users tend to be
most engaged with the content of a mailing list when they first subscribe.
Over time, their open rates and engagement rates will naturally decline.
Keep gathering new subscribers to ensure there is always a percentage of
your subscribers that are highly engaged with your content.
Wrap-Up
While the bulk of your email opt-ins will likely come from your
website, there are many other ways to grow your mailing list
independently of your website. Not every strategy listed in this chapter
will be appropriate for every organization, so take time to consider which
of the 16 strategies presented in this chapter you can use to grow your
mailing list.
Whether you want to leverage social media, do paid advertising
campaigns, or run a contest, there are always more ways to accelerate
your list growth beyond getting opt-ins on your website.
Action Steps:
Make a list of 50 potential partners that you can do email swaps
with.
Leverage your social media profiles to build your mailing list and
promote your existing email content.
Determine whether paid list-building strategies including coregistration advertising, Google AdWords, and email list rentals are
appropriate for your mailing list.
Add social sharing and “forward to a friend” buttons to your email
content.
Make a shareable archive of past email content on your website.
Consider what other ways you can grow your list independently of
opt-ins from your website.
CASE STUDY #3
GMB Fitness
GMB Fitness (gmb.io), founded by Andy Fossett, is a website that
offers home-based training programs that combine gymnastic and martial
arts exercise movements for fitness enthusiasts at all levels of strength
and experience. I had the opportunity to interview Fossett as part of this
book. The company began by offering DVDs, but quickly transitioned to
offering video training courses and membership programs. Their content
teaches what they call “physical autonomy” and is delivered through a
variety of exercise tutorials and online coaching.
GMB Fitness uses email as one of their primary marketing channels.
Fossett said that email marketing is the single most important part of their
business after the video content they produce. They have developed a
variety of different opt-in forms and related autoresponder sequences
based on specific goals, such as handstands and stretching. They also
have a general autoresponder series that teaches their philosophy of
exercise and publishes a weekly newsletter to subscribers that have
completed their autoresponder series. They have also created onboarding
sequences that help new customers engage with their website and the
products they purchase.
Fossett told me email is also an invaluable communication tool
between his company and its audience. He commented, “It gives us a
chance to help them and increases their trust in us, which increases the
likelihood of a beneficial long-term relationship. We also get feedback
and intelligence that helps us know what our audience wants to buy and
what they think of our current products. We can use that to improve our
programs and marketing.”
In order to attract opt-ins to their website, GMB Fitness uses a
variety of mini-programs that teach about specific fitness topics their
audience is interested in. Their free subscribers receive access to a
“members area” that contains about a dozen free video resources that are
tightly coupled with their paid products.
Fossett informed me that the most effective opt-ins scratch a specific
itch. For example, their customers couldn’t care less about content that
teaches them how to stretch properly. However, if they package stretching
instruction videos around an ailment that stretching solves, such as
painful mobility, readers will sign up for those opt-ins in much greater
numbers.
As GMB Fitness has gained a reputation for producing great content,
they have had the opportunity to publish guest posts on major fitness
sites, which have generated a lot of opt-ins. Fossett said, “We had a series
of five posts on artofmanliness.com that drove a couple thousand
subscribers. We’ve since had a couple of large websites feature us for a
series on a tight theme, and each has performed well.”
When I asked Fossett why he thinks his business does so well, he
said there are no secrets. If anything, the only secret is to “work your butt
off making great content for several years.” Fossett and his team have
worked hard to build a professional, graphically appealing website that
contains great content. He commented, “We make it very clear that we
are experts with quality materials, so the other stuff works easily. Without
the foundation, all the best tactics can fail.”
One piece of advice Fossett has to offer is: pay attention to what
your messages look like on mobile devices. A study from Movable Ink
finds that as many as 66% of all emails opened are done on a smartphone
or tablet.15 He said, “If your emails don’t look good on an iPhone, you’re
missing out. You need to make sure that your messages are easy to read
and click on using mobile devices.” He added that there are simply no
excuses for sending emails that don’t render correctly on mobile, because
nearly all major ESPs include mobile preview tools.
Another tip that Fossett gave was to consider re-sending an email to
subscribers that don’t open it. He said, “A few days after you send an
email, create a segment of people who did not open it. Then change the
subject line and send it to those people again. It’s a simple way to get a
10+% increase in people seeing and clicking your messages.”
Fossett also reiterated the importance of testing. He advised that you
should test multiple subject lines, multiple from-addresses, and multiple
calls-to-action to see what works best. He also suggested testing the
frequency of your autoresponder series by creating two different versions
of an autoresponder series with the same messages sent at different
sending frequencies to see which generates the most engagement and
sales.
GMB Fitness has grown a mailing list of nearly 60,000 subscribers.
Fossett informed me they are adding 1,000 new subscribers each week
and hope to hit 100,000 subscribers within the next year.
The most impressive part of GMB’s email statistics are its
engagement numbers. He says it isn’t uncommon for them to have 60%
of their recipients open any one email. Nearly 80% of his company’s
sales come from people that are on at least one of their email lists.
He closed by saying, “The main point is that email is a great tool
that can generate lots of sales and subscriptions if you use it effectively.
It’s a tool that reaches almost 100% of the people online, and it’s
relatively inexpensive to use, so the ROI on learning to leverage email
effectively is probably higher than any other form of promotion.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Mailing Your List: How, What, and
When to Send to Your Audience
As your mailing list grows, you will be faced with the challenge of
regularly sending educational and marketing content to your mailing list.
You will need to decide how often you want to email your list, what types
of email you want to send, and whether you want to leverage advanced
strategies like marketing automation and list segmentation. You will need
to create a series of welcome emails in an autoresponder series that will
help new subscribers get engaged with your content. You will also need
to create a schedule of mailings so subscribers that have completed your
autoresponder series continue to receive email from you on a regular
basis.
The First Email Your Subscribers Receive
The first email that every new subscriber will receive from your
mailing list is called the welcome email. Sending a well-written welcome
email to each of your subscribers is the first step in nurturing long-term
subscribers that will always be happy to receive your email. This email
should accomplish several different tasks, including thanking subscribers
for joining your mailing list, setting expectations for the type and quantity
of email they are going to receive, getting your subscribers to whitelist
your email address, and encouraging them to take further action.
At the top of your welcome email, include a personal message that
thanks the subscriber for signing up for your mailing list. If appropriate
for your industry, use personal language as if you were writing to a new
friend that you just met for coffee. Next, you should tell your subscribers
what kind of email they are going to receive and how often they are going
to receive it. This will help your subscribers set a mental expectation for
what kind of emails they should expect.
You should also ask your email subscribers to whitelist your email
address or add you to their safe sender list so that your messages never go
to their spam folder. Feel free to copy MarketBeat’s whitelist instructions
page located at marketbeat.com/safe-sender. Finally, you should consider
what action you want your users to take next. You might want them to
read a particular piece of content on your website, persuade them to
check out one of your products, or ask that they recommend your mailing
list to a friend of theirs. Include a hyperlink with a clear call-to-action at
the bottom of your email and thank them again for joining your list.
Here is the copy for the actual welcome email currently being used
by MarketBeat:
Matthew Paulson
To: subscriber@marketbeat.com
Subject: Welcome to MarketBeat Daily
Hi there –
Thank you for subscribing to MarketBeat Daily!
With your free subscription, you will receive a concise daily
summary of analysts’ upgrades, downgrades, and new coverage
(delivered at approximately 1:00 PM ET).
In the meantime, be sure to add MarketBeat.com to your safe sender
list or address book to ensure your newsletter gets delivered to your
inbox. Click Here to Learn How.
You might also be interested in our premium email newsletter,
MarketBeat Daily Premium, which provides instant email and SMS
alerts for stocks that interest you, additional ratings data, and
delivery before the market opens.
Click Here to Learn More About MarketBeat Daily Premium.
Thanks!
Matthew Paulson
MarketBeat
Creating an Autoresponder Series
An autoresponder series, sometimes referred to as a welcome series,
is a series of pre-written emails that every new subscriber receives in
sequential order after signing up for your mailing list. A new subscriber
might receive your welcome email on the first day of their subscription,
another email on the third day of their subscription, another on the fifth
day of their subscription, etc. The purpose of an autoresponder series is to
send a consistent set of messages to every new subscriber, so they can
become familiar with your writing and your company’s products and
services.
There are seven different ways that you can use the emails in your
autoresponder series:
Promoting your company’s products and services
Providing additional educational content to your subscribers
Cross-promoting your social media channels and SMS distribution
list
Asking them to add your email address to their safe sender list
Promoting another company’s products as an affiliate
Highlighting existing content on your website to your new
subscribers
Asking subscribers for feedback about your content and your
company’s products
Creating an autoresponder series is more of an art than a science.
There is no perfect length for a series, and there is no perfect number of
emails to include. You will be able to track the performance of any one
message, but it’s difficult to split-test an entire autoresponder series. I
recommend sending out messages anywhere from two to four days apart
in your autoresponder series and having a total length between two and
four months. This may mean that you are including as many as 30 emails
in your autoresponder series, but it doesn’t have to be a daunting task if
you simply write a new email every few days as your oldest subscribers
near the end of the series.
Every major email service provider (ESP) includes the ability to
create a series of autoresponder messages that new subscribers will
receive automatically over time on the dates that you specify. Typically,
you will simply need to enter the subject line and body of your email into
a form provided by your ESP. You will also need to specify when a new
subscriber will receive a particular email, such as on the 10th day of their
subscription. Some email service providers will also let you push an
email to the next day when an autoresponder message is scheduled to go
out on a weekend or holiday when someone is unlikely to check their
email.
If you want to see how an autoresponder series works in practice,
consider creating a new email account and using it for the sole purpose of
watching autoresponder emails come in from lists that you have signed
up for. Use the single-purpose email account that you created to sign up
for mailing lists of some of your competitors and well-known marketers
to get ideas for your autoresponder series.
You can see all the autoresponder emails sent out by MarketBeat just
by completing an opt-in form on the MarketBeat website. Pat Flynn
(smartpassiveincome.com) also has a particularly good autoresponder
series that’s worth checking out.
Here’s a sample layout of what the first 30 days of an autoresponder
series might look like:
Day 1: Send your welcome email.
Day 2: Highlight some of your website’s “best-of” content.
Day 4: Introduce your company’s products and services.
Day 6: Ask subscribers to add your email address to their safe
sender list.
Day 8: Provide a piece of educational content or training material.
Day 10: Invite your subscribers to sign-up for your SMS list (or
social media accounts if you do not have an SMS list).
Day 12: Promote one of your company’s products or services.
Day 14: Ask subscribers for feedback about your content.
Day 16: Promote another company’s products as an affiliate
Day 18: Invite your subscribers to follow you on social media.
Day 20: Provide more educational content or training material.
Day 22: Promote one of your company’s products or services.
Day 24: Provide links to helpful stories and resources around the
web.
Day 26: Reintroduce some older content on your website to your
new subscribers.
Day 28: Promote another company’s products as an affiliate.
Day 30: Offer a one-time discount on your company’s products and
services.
The biggest mistake that you can make with your autoresponder
series is not having one at all. If you don’t regularly email your list, they
will become disengaged with your content and will forget that they gave
you permission to email them in the first place. If you try to email a
mailing list that you haven’t contacted in six months, invariably some
subscribers will forget who you are and accuse you of spamming them.
Sending regular emails every few days for the first several months of a
user’s subscription is arguably the best way to keep them engaged with
your content and interested in your company’s products and services.
Broadcast Emails
In addition to your autoresponder series, you will want to regularly
send messages to your entire email list. These messages are known as
broadcast emails because you are broadcasting a single message to your
list.
Broadcast emails are one-time messages that get sent to your entire
mailing list at a specific date and time for a specific purpose. They
typically do not get re-sent to your email list, because your entire
audience has already been exposed to that message. Broadcast emails are
often used to make an announcement, encourage subscribers to engage
with a piece of content, or encourage subscribers to buy a specific
product. They are also arguably the most critical component of keeping
email subscribers engaged over time.
Broadcast emails serve three primary purposes. First, they keep
users who have completed your autoresponder series engaged with your
content. By regularly sending new educational and informational content
to your mailing list, they will continue to receive value from you, will be
more likely to stay engaged with your content, and will be less likely to
unsubscribe. Second, sending broadcast emails is the best way to make
announcements to your list and keep them informed about what’s going
on with your business. Finally, sending broadcast emails to promote
products and services will be one of your key monetization points. You
can use broadcast emails to promote your company’s products and
services, or you can use them to promote another company’s products and
services as an affiliate.
Planning Your Broadcast Email Calendar
You will want to develop a schedule of the emails that you plan to
send to your mailing list each month prior to the first day of that month.
By creating a plan ahead of time, you can space out your emails
appropriately throughout the month and can create a good rhythm of
educational and content emails, followed by sales and marketing emails.
If you send too many sales emails in a row or don’t take a day off from
mailing your list for several days, you may upset some of your
subscribers and cause them to unsubscribe from your list.
I recommend printing out a calendar from the web and physically
writing down the emails that you want to send out. You don’t need to
write out the entire email you plan on sending—just the broad category of
the message, such as “newsletter,” “marketing email,” “product launch
announcement,” “tip/resource,” or “content promotion.” By putting your
broadcast email schedule on paper, you’ll be able to visually see if your
messages are spread out equally and aren’t too focused on any single type
of email.
Creating your broadcast email calendar is also more of an art than a
science. There is no ideal number of emails you should send at any given
month. There is no perfect frequency that suggests you should email
every day, every other day, or every third day. There are no hard rules that
suggest you should send at least one educational email for every sales
email that you send out. The most important thing is to consistently send
relevant email content to your subscribers to keep them engaged with
your mailing list.
The frequency at which you send broadcast emails will be somewhat
dependent upon the niche of your mailing list. For niches that have highly
committed and highly engaged fans, you will want to email more
frequently. Sports fans, investors, and news junkies may want to receive
email from you daily because the information in those niches is
constantly changing. Niches with hobbyists and casual fans probably
won’t want to receive email from you daily. The general rule of thumb
that I use for mailing frequency is that you should never mail your list
any less than once per week, and you should almost never mail your list
any more than once per day.
Writing a Broadcast Series
If you are launching a new product or running a promotion to
generate sales for an existing product, you will want to send a series of
emails over the course of several days. When you only send one email
about a product or service that you want to promote, your subscribers
might miss the email altogether or might simply not have enough
information to make a purchasing decision. By sending a series of emails
over a few days or even a couple of weeks, you are keeping the product
or service fresh in their minds. You can also use different selling
techniques in the variety of messages you send to your list.
Here is an example layout of how a series of emails can work:
Announcement Email (Day 1)
You first email should serve as an official announcement for the
availability of your new product or for the promotion that you’re
running. Describe what the product does and how it can help your
subscribers. If you are running a sale, you should include the
discounted pricing information as well as how long the sale will be
available.
FAQ Email (Day 3)
The goal of the second email is to provide as much information as
possible about the product or promotion to your subscribers. Think
of all the major questions a subscriber might ask about your product
or the promotion and answer them in an email. This email can be
1,000 words in length or longer. People that are really interested in
your product will take the time to read all of it.
Video Tour Email (Day 5)
Record a YouTube video that shows how your product or service
works. If it’s a software program or digital information product that
you’re selling, do a screencast that shows it off. Your email should
be little more than a link to watch your video and a link to purchase
the product if the subscriber is interested. The video that you record
will help visual learners connect with your product more than they
might have otherwise.
Features and Benefits Email (Day 7)
In this email, you will remind your subscribers what your product
does and how it can help them. Write about the specific problems
that your product can solve for them. Include a list of all the major
features of the products and how it can benefit them.
Social Proof Email (Day 9)
Collect a few testimonials from your existing customers and send
them out to demonstrate social proof. Subscribers will be more
likely to buy your product if they know that other people like them
have already purchased your product and gotten value out of it.
Warning Email (Day 11)
In the second-to-last day of your campaign, you should try to create
a sense of urgency and warn subscribers that tomorrow will be the
last day whatever discount or bonus you are offering will be
available. You can also use this email as another opportunity to
remind your subscribers of the features and benefits in your product
or service.
Last Chance Email (Day 12)
On the last day of your campaign, you should tell your subscribers
that it’s their last opportunity to take advantage of the discount or
bonus you are offering. Be clear that the price will be increasing, or
the bonus will be going away after tonight and that they should act
now if they want to take advantage of the offer. This email is
generally very short and contains little other than the “last chance”
warning and a link to your sales page.
Second Last Chance Email (Day 12)
We often send out a second, third and even a fourth email in the
afternoon or evening of the last day of an email campaign. These
messages all contain a variation of the “today is the final day of the
sale” messaging and other copy we have used in our campaign. In
our 2021 New Year’s campaign, we generated 91 sales from the first
email on the last day of the campaign and 247 sales from the second,
third and fourth emails we sent that day. If you only send one email
on the last day of your campaign, you are leaving money on the
table.
A Sample Email Series from MarketBeat
To provide a better idea of what an actual broadcast email series can
look like, I’ve made the copy that MarketBeat used for an entire email
launch available online for free for readers of Email Marketing
Demystified.
The email series linked below was for our New Year’s Eve sale at
the end of 2021. The campaign was sent to approximately 2 million
subscribers and generated approximately 400 sales of our premium
subscription at $199/year per subscriber. To access the free sample
broadcast series, visit mattpaulson.com/sample-campaign.
Tracking Your Results
Some of the broadcast emails that you send your audience will be
much more effective than others. It may not be immediately apparent why
one email receives better engagement than others, because only by
consistently looking at your numbers over time can you begin to identify
commonalities between emails that work and those that don’t.
Here are the numbers that you should track in every email:
Sends
This is the number of people that your email was sent to. Your
number of sends should equal the total size of your mailing list.
Bounces
This is the number of messages that were returned as undeliverable.
If your bounce rate is higher than 2%, you may need to clean up the
mailing list or your domain name, or your mailing IP address may
have been blacklisted.
Opens
This is the number of times your email was opened by subscribers.
Note that open rates are much less reliable than they used to be
because some email clients block tracking images and others (such
as Apple Mail) open tracking images regardless of the email was
opened or not.
Open Rate
This is the percentage of subscribers that opened an email, out of
everyone who received the message. Open rates can vary
dramatically based on your industry and the engagement of your
mailing list. For well-maintained lists, open rates tend to range from
15% to 35%.
Clicks
This is the total number of subscribers that clicked on a link in your
message.
Clickthrough Rate
This is the percentage of people that opened your email, out of
everyone that got messaged, and clicked on a link. A good
marketing email will have a clickthrough rate of between 5% and
10%.
Unsubscribes
This is the number of people that unsubscribed from your list by
clicking on the unsubscribe link in any given email. Seeing a higher-thanusual number of unsubscribes can indicate a message didn’t engage well
with your mailing list.
There are additional metrics that you should track in sales and
marketing emails:
Conversions
This is the number of sales or other sign-ups that occurred because
of an email.
Conversion Rate
This is the percentage of people that clicked on a link in your email
that purchased a product or service because of the email.
Revenue
This is how much money you made in sales from people clicking
through. At the end of the day, the revenue that your email generates
is the metric that matters the most.
Whenever you send out an email to your mailing list, go back and
review how the message performed 72 hours after it was sent. By this
time, most of the people that are ever going to read your email will have
done so. Compare the open rates, clickthrough rates, and conversion rates
to previous emails. Were the numbers significantly higher or lower? If so,
try to identify how your current email is different from any previous
messages you sent. Ask yourself what you can learn based on the
performance of your most recent email.
Is Open Tracking Dead?
For the last two decades, marketers have relied on open rates as one
of the primary metrics to determine if an email marketing campaign is
successful. In late 2021, Apple implemented a new technology called
Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) which made email open tracking
unreliable for iPhone, iPad, and macOS users that use the Apple mail app.
MPP was first introduced as part of iOS 15 as a means of protecting user
privacy from unwanted tracking pixels, sometimes referred to as “spy
pixels.”
MPP downloads all images in an email, including tracking pixels,
using a third-party server to prevent email senders from knowing when a
recipient has opened their message. This means that every email sent to
an email account using Apple Mail with MPP enabled will be marked as
opened, regardless of whether the user opened the email. MPP also
obfuscates location data, making it more difficult for marketers to
segment users based on geography.
There are approximately 900 million active iPhone users as of mid2022, most of which will have MPP technology enabled on their email
client. You should expect that 20% to 40% of your email list, depending
on your niche and your audience, will have MPP enabled. Being unable
to accurately track open rates for 20% to 40% of an email list will have
profound implications, both for measuring the performance of an email
campaign and for measuring the engagement of your users.
Many email service providers are blocking email opens triggered by
MPP as to not artificially inflate open rate data. They are also
encouraging marketers to switch to other metrics to track email
performance and user engagement. Clicks, conversions, and revenue are
the metrics that marketers should use to track email campaign
performance in 2022 beyond. Clicks are arguably a better metric to track
than opens, because a click indicated that a user opened your email, read
it, and was interested enough in the email to click on your link and learn
more. Open rates just tell you how many people opened your message,
not how many people were interested in the content of your email.
Conversions are ultimately the best metric to determine whether an email
campaign worked, because your conversion data will tell you whether
you made money from an email or if you didn’t.
MPP also has profound implications for email list hygiene.
Historically marketers would automatically unsubscribe users that
haven’t opened an email within a certain period, often 6 or 12 months.
Removing inactive users improves your engagement metrics making it
more likely that email providers will deliver your messages to your
subscribers’ inboxes and not the spam folder. MPP makes it more
difficult, but not impossible, to determine which of your users are active
and which are not. Email list hygiene in a post-MPP world is covered in
detail in chapter seven of this book.
Some email marketing experts, especially those that sell expensive
courses and consulting services, have sowed fear, uncertainty, and doubt
about the future of email in a world where open counts and location data
can no longer be accurately tracked. Don’t buy into the fear. Open rate
data is still available for non-Apple Mail users. Location data can still be
tracked on clickthrough. Email performance and user engagement can be
tracked through other metrics. While marketers certainly need to adapt to
MPP, it is far from a death knell for email marketing.
Create a Weekly or Bi-Weekly Newsletter
One of the best ways to keep your mailing list engaged with your
content over time is to publish a weekly or bi-weekly newsletter
containing content that is interesting to your readers. By consistently
sending a newsletter on a specific day of the week, your subscribers will
begin to expect and look forward to your weekly newsletter. They will get
in a habit of reading it on a specific day of the week and are more likely
to be engaged with your content over time.
Your newsletter should contain five to ten stories or news items that
users can scan through and click on to learn more if they are interested.
This doesn’t mean that you need to write five to ten original articles for
your newsletter, though. In fact, you don’t need to create any new content
for your newsletter at all. You can simply repurpose content that you have
recently published to your website for your newsletter. If you aren’t
creating original content, you can simply act as a curator and link to
interesting stories that your subscribers will be interested in.
For example, Hiten Shah publishes a weekly newsletter for software
entrepreneurs called SaaS Weekly (hiten.com), which contains a round-up
of stories that are interesting to software entrepreneurs. He doesn’t
publish any original content in his newsletter but has built a following of
more than ten thousand subscribers based on his ability to find interesting
stories to share with other software entrepreneurs.
HubSpot has put together an article titled “18 Email Newsletter
Examples We Love Getting in Our Inboxes”16 that shows off several
particularly high-quality newsletters. If you need ideas about how to
create a newsletter, this is a great place to start.
Marketing Automation for Email
If your company or organization sells several different products or
has customers with multiple divergent interest areas, you might consider
using marketing automation techniques, so customers only receive email
content that is relevant to them.
Email marketing automation is the process of sending targeted email
content to a certain set of subscribers who have taken a specific action or
expressed a specific interest. In other words, email marketing automation
is simply sending the right email to the right person at the right time. By
sending more targeted and relevant content to your subscribers based on
their interests and actions, they are more likely to stay engaged with your
mailing list and buy products and services from your company.
For example, if a customer signs up for a 30-day free trial of a
product, they should receive an email campaign that teaches them how to
use that product and sells them on continuing with the product after their
30-day trial is completed. Obviously, only users that sign up for a free
trial of that product should receive those emails, because they would be
irrelevant to anyone else. When you send an irrelevant email to people,
they will be confused as to the purpose of the message and will likely
become disengaged with your content.
There is a lot of upfront work involved with creating marketing
automation campaigns. Most email service providers will do the heavy
technical lifting for you, but you will need to write an entire series of
emails for each campaign that you create and will have to figure out how
to trigger a campaign for a specific person when they take an action.
If your mailing list is in a very specific niche and you generally only
send out content about one or two topics, marketing automation may not
be necessary. If your company doesn’t sell any products or only sells one
or two products or services, email marketing automation might be
overkill. Marketing automation can be an incredibly effective tool, but it
may not be worth the effort for smaller and more focused lists.
Here are some types of email marketing automation campaigns that
can be very effective:
Welcome Series
You may not realize it, but your initial welcome series (or
autoresponder series) is a form of marketing automation. Sending a
welcome series to new subscribers to your list is a great way to get
them up to speed about your content and your company’s products
and services.
Product Education Emails
Whenever a new customer buys a product or service from your
company, send them a series of emails that teaches them how to use
it. This will increase the likelihood that they will use and get value
from your product. By increasing the percentage of your customers
that use your product, you are less likely to get refund requests, and
customers are more likely to buy from you again in the future.
Order Confirmation Emails
Whenever someone buys a product or service from your company,
send an email thanking them for their order along with their order
details. You should also provide a call-to-action in this email that
will try to get users to return to your website to re-engage with your
content or to view related products.
Subscriber Re-Engagement Emails
When a subscriber hasn’t opened an email from you or visited your
website in a couple of months, send them some highly valuable
content to try to get them re-engaged with your content. You can
also send an email asking for feedback to see if there’s something
you can add or change that might engage them more.
Anniversary Emails
Send subscribers a virtual anniversary card after they have been on
your mailing list for either six months or one year. You can also
include a time-limited coupon for your company’s products or
services to encourage them to take action and become a customer.
Free Trial Emails
If you offer a service that has a free trial, you should send anyone
currently in a trial some information about the product they are
using, as well as sales and marketing emails to persuade them to
upgrade to a paid subscription.
Former Customer Email
If you run a subscription or a recurring service business, consider
creating a campaign that reminds former customers about the
features and benefits of your service and allows them to re-register
at a discounted rate. These emails work extremely well if written
correctly and can prevent you from losing customers forever.
Cart Abandonment Emails
If a customer adds a product to their shopping cart on an ecommerce
website but doesn’t complete the purchase, send them information
about the products in their shopping cart over the next several days.
This can be a very effective way to save lost sales.
Upsell Emails
If you have a multi-tiered pricing plan, send an email to customers
asking them to upgrade to the next level or service whenever they
are about to reach the limitations of their current plan.
Triggered Emails
Triggered emails are sent when a user takes a specific action, such as
visiting a certain page on your website. For example, you might
want to send a sales email to someone that clicks on a “compare
products” page on your website.
The Power of Triggered Emails
Imagine if you had the power to send someone a message when they
were in their inbox going through their email. Your new message would
appear at the top of your subscriber’s inbox, just waiting to be read. Your
message would get incredibly strong open and clickthrough rates,
because the email would be impossible to miss. While this ability might
seem like a marketer’s fantasy, it is entirely possible by setting up a
triggered email campaign.
Triggered email campaigns are emails that get sent to your
subscribers when they take a specific action, such as opening one of your
emails or clicking on a link in one of your other email campaigns.
Triggered emails can also be fired when someone visits a specific page on
your website, such as your landing page or checkout page. Triggered
email campaigns are incredibly effective at catching the attention of your
subscribers. You may find that a triggered email gets double or even triple
the open rate of a normal email blast to your list and open-to-click rates
as high as 10%.
MarketBeat has had great success leveraging triggered emails to
promote its top advertisers. Whenever one of our subscribers clicks on an
advertisement in our newsletter or on our website for the first time each
day, we send them a marketing email that promotes one of our bestperforming affiliate offers. We have setup our targeting software so that
no more than one triggered email is sent per day and our subscribers do
not receive the same triggered campaign twice.
MarketBeat operates at significant scale and drives more than
50,000 clicks to its advertisers each day. This means we will send as
many as 50,000 triggered campaign emails per day to our subscribers. On
average these emails have a 40% open rate and a 10% clickthrough rate,
generating an additional 2,000 ad clicks per day for our best advertisers.
While triggered campaigns are incredibly powerful, they aren’t
universally supported by email service providers and marketing
automation platforms. We had to custom build a platform so that we
could send triggered emails exactly they way we wanted to. SendInBlue,
Drip, and Constant Contact are ESPs that advertise having the ability to
setup custom email triggers. If you plan on using triggered emails as part
of your email marketing program, ask your ESP if their platform will
allow you to make custom email triggers.
List Segmentation
Another aspect of email marketing automation is segmentation.
Segmentation is simply the process of breaking up a mailing list into
smaller lists—known as segments—based on interests.
If you use an email service provider with marketing automation
functionality, you can send an email that allows users to express interest
in learning about various topics. Users will click on one or more topics
they are interested in, and they will automatically be added to the
segments or sub-lists they select. Granted, you may have to email your
mailing list multiple times to get a good percentage of your subscribers to
self-select into different segments. When segmenting your mailing list,
you will be sending a larger number of emails in each month, but each
email will only be sent to a specific portion of your list. This will increase
the relevance of the emails that you send to any given subscriber.
For example, if you had a blog about building websites, you might
have some users that are interested in different content management
systems like WordPress, Drupal, and ConcreteCMS. Users that are
interested in WordPress might not be interested in getting email about
Drupal and ConcreteCMS. If you have a piece of educational content
about WordPress you want to send to your mailing list, you might only
mail it to the segment of your audience that has expressed interest in
learning about WordPress.
Segmentation works best for large mailing lists that have more than
25,000 subscribers and for lists related to broad topics with smaller
interest areas. If you have a smaller list, it may not be worth the effort to
segment your audience if there will be only a small number of people in
any given segment. If your mailing list is very focused on a single topic,
segmentation may not be necessary. You should identify between three
and six interest areas to use as segments of your mailing list. If you try to
create too many, you may end up with very small segments that aren’t big
enough to be worth mailing individually.
At MarketBeat, we segment users based off interest categories and
user behavior. For example, if a user clicks on an ad about options
trading, we automatically put them into our options trading segment. We
have about ten different segments for different categories of investing that
people could be interested. That way, when someone approaches us about
sending an advertising email about an options trading product, we can
send it only to the people we know are already interested in options
trading. By only emailing users about only the content they are likely to
be interested, we have higher engagement rates and lower unsubscribe
rates.
Wrap-Up
While developing a plan to regularly email your mailing list through
your autoresponder series and through broadcast emails may seem like a
big chore, it doesn’t have to be. Start simply by writing your welcome
email and the first few emails in your autoresponder series. Continue to
add a new email to it every couple of days until it’s complete.
As your first subscribers begin to complete the series, start sending
periodic broadcast emails to your list to ensure that all your subscribers
are regularly getting email from you. Over time, consider more advanced
strategies like list segmentation and marketing automation to maximize
the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.
Action Steps:
Write your welcome email and enter it into your email service
provider.
Write your first three autoresponder emails and add them into your
email service provider.
Create a schedule of all the broadcast emails you want to send to
your list next month.
Consider sending a weekly newsletter to your subscribers.
Track the performance of every email that you send.
CHAPTER FIVE
Writing Email That Inspires Users to
Take Action
You have undoubtedly written thousands of emails in your life. You
probably send and receive email from friends, family, coworkers, and
even complete strangers on a regular basis for any number of reasons.
While writing an email to any one person is a straightforward endeavor,
sending an email to a large group of people is an entirely different
skillset. You need to craft a message that attracts the attention of a diverse
group of individuals, clearly communicates a single objective, and
inspires them to take a desired action. If that doesn’t sound hard enough,
you must do this without the use of video, audio, images (sometimes),
and other dynamic content. You also must deal with the technical
peculiarities of email, avoid spam filters, and comply with your country’s
anti-spam laws.
Writing effective email is both an art and a science. There are many
best practices to follow when writing email that are covered in this
chapter. You can also test different body copy, subject lines, and calls-toaction to determine which types of email will generate the most revenue
with your list. While it’s normally good to follow copywriting best
practices, sometimes email lists respond in unexpected ways. You might
write a great email and get zero sales. You might write a short two
sentence email and get dozens of sales. You won’t always know why one
email performs better than the other, but over time you will have a better
understanding of what types of content and messaging resonates with
your audience.
Understanding Your Audience
To effectively write to your audience, you first must understand who
they are. How old are your typical subscribers? What do they do for a
living? What gender are they? Are they married? Where do they live?
What are their interests? What problems do they face? Why did they sign
up for your mailing list? If you don’t know these things, conduct a
survey, and ask people to share information about themselves, so you
have a better idea of who makes up your email list.
I recommend creating a fictional character that epitomizes your
typical customer, known as an avatar. The character that you create
should have a name, an age, a gender, a job, a hometown, personal
interests, and problems that they face daily. The avatar that I created for
MarketBeat is named Bill. He is about sixty years old. He’s married, is a
homeowner, and has some money to invest in the stock market. He likes
to pick his own stocks but isn’t sure whose advice he should listen to. He
can live just about anywhere in the United States or Canada and loves to
keep up with the day-to-day news in the stock market. He’s also very
concerned about having money to live on during his retirement years. By
creating an avatar, you will have a better idea of who you are marketing
to and, in many ways, can get inside the minds of your subscribers.
When you write an email to your mailing list, write as if you are
sending a personal message to your avatar. Ask yourself what your avatar
would need to hear to act based on your email. What kind of hopes do
they have that you can encourage? What kind of fears do they have that
you can assuage? If you write to your avatar and use lots of “you”
language, subscribers will subconsciously think that your email was
written to them specifically and will be more likely to engage with your
message. Keep the focus on your subscribers as much as possible. Make
your emails about them, not about you.
Here’s an example of an email that uses personal language:
Matthew Paulson
To: subscriber@marketbeat.com
Subject: Crazy market volatility
Hi [Name] –
Did you see what happened in the market with TSLA today? It was
down by 2.3% this morning. When I checked my computer after
lunch, it was up by 1.8%.
I don’t know what you think, but it seems like there has been a lot
more volatility in the stock market for the last few months. You’ve
probably seen stocks that go up in the morning, down in the
afternoon, and go back up after hours. It’s crazy.
Would you like to be able to identify the most volatile stocks in the
S&P 500 so that you don’t have to feel like you’re riding an
emotional roller coaster every day?
Here’s a free report (just for you) which shows which stocks are
most likely to see volatility in the weeks and months to come.
Click Here to Get Your Free Report
Matthew Paulson
MarketBeat.com
Parts of an Email
When getting ready to put together an email, it would be easy to
think that the only thing you must write is the message body. However,
there are several different components of every message that you send to
your list. You need to put as much thought and effort into the other parts
of your email as you would in the main message body.
Here are the key components of an email:
Subject Line
This is the subject of your message. It is the first thing your
subscribers will see and will determine whether they open your
message.
Preheader
The preheader is the preview text included after the subject line in
some email services, such as Gmail. It can serve as a second subject
line that will further encourage users to open your email. If you
don’t intentionally add a preheader, most email services will use the
first sentence or two of your email as a preheader.
“From” Name
This is the name of the person sending the email. Use your personal
name in lieu of the name of your company, because email users are
more likely to open an email from an actual person.
Message Body
This is the main text of your email.
Call-to-Action
This is a hyperlink at the bottom of your message body that
persuades users to take a specific action, such as clicking on a
hyperlink.
Signature
Keep your email signature simple. Long email signatures can be a
distraction to the main content of your email. I personally just use
my name on one line and the name of my company on the following
line.
Postscript
Consider periodically using a “P.S.” below your email signature to
serve as a secondary sales tool after your main email. For example,
you could include something like, “P.S. Remember that our service
comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you’re not satisfied
with our service within the first 30 days, just let us know, and we’ll
provide you a full refund.”
Footer
Your footer usually contains your unsubscribe link and other
information that you need to include to stay compliant with antispam laws, such as your mailing address and the name of your
company. Your footer will likely be the same for every email that
you send to your list.
Types of Messages
Every email that you send to your mailing list will be sent for a
specific purpose. You might have an announcement to make or want your
subscribers to read a piece of content you recently posted. You may want
them to check out one of your company’s products or keep them engaged
by sending them helpful information.
Here are some of the main reasons that you will email your list:
Announcements
Whenever you have something big to announce, you should
announce it to your email subscribers, so they know they are valued
members of your community.
Internal Sales and Marketing
You will periodically want to send sales and marketing emails to
your subscribers about your company’s products and services. Make
sure you only email subscribers about a product or a sale they
haven’t already purchased.
Third-Party Advertising
In order to generate additional revenue, you can promote another
company’s products and services as an affiliate or through another
advertising deal that you negotiate. Read the monetization chapter of
this book for more information about how to do this.
Weekly Newsletter
Consider creating a weekly newsletter for your subscribers that
contains useful and interesting content. Your weekly newsletter will
help keep users interested and engaged with your content.
User Engagement
You will want to regularly send your subscribers valuable tips,
resources, and other educational information that will keep them
engaged with your mailing list.
Feedback
Whenever you need feedback about an idea, email your audience
and ask them for it. Ask two or three questions and request they
respond with their feedback by replying.
List Management
You may need to periodically send messages to users relating to the
status of their subscription. You might need to reconfirm their
subscription if they haven’t opened an email from you in a while, or you
might want them to identify specific interests as part of a segmentation
campaign.
Give, Give, Give, Ask
While you will email your audience for many different reasons, you
need to keep a healthy balance between sending emails that provide value
to your audience and emails that take value away.
Emails that contain information helpful to your readers at no cost
such as tips, educational content, resources, and training videos, provide
value to your audience. Emails that ask your audience to purchase a
product or take action that benefits you more than them will take value
from your audience.
I recommend sending at least two emails that provide value to your
audience for every one email that takes it from them. Ideally, you will
provide so much value to your audience that they respond to your sales
and marketing emails out of sheer gratitude for the value you have
already provided. This principle is outlined in detail by Gary Vaynerchuk
in his book, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy
Social World.
Writing Great Subject Lines
Your subject lines are the most important words that you will write
as part of your email marketing strategy. If you write a subject line that is
uninspired and doesn’t grab the attention of your subscribers, they
probably aren’t going to open your message.
According to a report from Chadwick Martin Bailey, 64% of people
say they will choose to open an email because of the subject line.17 If you
write a great subject line, you’ll receive higher open rates, which will
lead to more clickthroughs and more sales. A well-written subject line
can often receive double the open rates of a poorly written one, which
will in turn double your clickthroughs and double the sales generated by
an email.
Here are some examples of a few different types of subject lines that
you can use:
Confrontation: Quit Wasting Your Time with Options Trading
Curiosity: Strange Question…?
How to: How to Double Your Revenue with One Little-Known
Email Marketing Technique
Humor: Forget Black Friday – Enjoy Wine Weekend
Numbers: What 83% of Golfers Screw Up on the Course
Reply-To: RE: Your Subscription to MarketBeat Daily Premium
Shocking: How I Lost 48 Pounds in ONE WEEK
Testimonial: “MarketBeat made me $12,384.32 in one trade”
Time Sensitive: Tonight’s Deadline (Last Chance!)
Tips: 3 Ways to Double Your Facebook Following
Warning: Don’t Miss Out!
Here are some of the subject lines that have received the highest
open rates in the history of MarketBeat:
An important reminder … (40.8% open rate)
RE: Clean Water Project (27.6% open rate)
I’m Sorry:\ (27.1% open rate)
Bad News (25% open rate)
Good News! :-) (24% open rate)
Clearing up some confusion (24.6% open rate)
Important (please read) (23.9% open rate)
Black Friday …in June? (21.9% open rate)
Weird Question? (21.4% open rate)
There are also several techniques that can modify subject lines to
emphasize words and to make unsaid promises about the content of your
message. If you are going to use any variation techniques (listed below),
switch them up from email to email, and don’t use any one technique
more than twice each month. Subscribers will notice these patterns if
used too often, rendering them ineffective.
Here are the techniques:
Make an Email Appear Personal
Make your entire subject line lowercase to imply that the message is
personal in nature, because individuals don’t always put the same
effort into writing an error-free and correctly-capitalized subject line.
For example, “how I beat the stock market” sounds a lot more
personal than “How I Beat the Stock Market.”
Imply Strong Emotion and Importance
You can uppercase your subject line to imply strong emotion or
importance to your email. For example, “I BEAT THE STOCK
MARKET” implies urgency and importance.
Specific Numbers
You can use specific numbers, like 23.6 or 29%, to imply accuracy
of your data. People are naturally wired to think that numbers are
less likely to be fabricated if they are more specific or have a
decimal point. For example, “How I Beat the Market by 7.8% in
2015” would imply that there’s more math showing how I beat the
stock market by that exact number.
Emphasize
You can emphasize a particular word by uppercasing only that word
or by surrounding that word with asterisks. For example, “How I
BEAT the Stock Market by 7.8% When Others Failed” draws
attention to the word “beat.”
More Information Inside
You can add ellipses (three periods) at the end of your subject line to
imply that there’s much more for users inside of your email. For
example, “How I beat the stock market…” implies that I will share
details in the body of the email.
Communicate Two Things at Once
Use brackets when you need to communicate two different things
about an email. For example, “How I Beat the Stock Market [Free
Video]” implies that users will both learn how to beat the stock
market and get a free video in their inbox.
Don’t believe that you must write every email subject line from
scratch. Feel free to use the subject lines listed in this chapter. You can
get good ideas for subject lines by searching for “subject line ideas” in
your search engine of choice.
I also recommend signing up for the mailing lists of well-known
Internet marketers like Russell Brunson, Ryan Deiss, Frank Kern, and
Eben Pagan so that you can see how entrepreneurs that make millions of
dollars each year perform their craft.
Writing an Announcement Email
Periodically, you’ll have a new project or some other news that you
want to share with your mailing list. It will be very tempting to write an
email that communicates how excited you are for your project and how
it’s going to change your business. Remember that your audience cares
about themselves much more than they care about you, so always make
announcements in such a way that keeps the focus on your subscribers.
Your announcement email should also attempt to generate
excitement and enthusiasm in your subscribers by suggesting how your
announcement can change their lives. Finally, don’t write something
vague that’s filled with a lot of hype and doesn’t tell your subscribers the
specifics of what you want to announce. Be clear and concise about the
details of your announcement in your email.
Here’s an example of an announcement email I might send to
MarketBeat subscribers:
Matthew Paulson
To: subscriber@marketbeat.com
Subject: Something New from MarketBeat
Hey [Name] –
There have been a lot of ups and downs in the market recently. Some
of your stocks are probably doing quite well, and there are others
that you might want to sweep under the rug.
You’ve really got to pick out strong companies with good
fundamentals to ride out the waves of a volatile market.
If you’d like help identifying a few great companies with good
fundamentals to add to your portfolio, we’ve developed a brand-new
screening tool that will allow you to find companies that are poised
to appreciate by more than 10% over the next 12 months through
some newly developed, advanced trading algorithms that hedge
funds don’t even have access to.
We’ve found one company that has a potential upside of more than
35%. Now, wouldn’t that be a nice return to brag about on the golf
course?
We call this new tool the MarketBeat Volatility Opportunity
Screener, and it’s included free with your existing subscription to
RatingsDB.
Click Here to Access the MarketBeat Volatility Screener
Thanks!
Matthew Paulson
MarketBeat.com
Writing a Promotional Email for an Advertiser
If you are promoting another company’s product or service in
exchange for an affiliate commission or another form of compensation,
you are personally endorsing that product or service, and that should be
reflected in your email. When writing a marketing email for an advertiser,
communicate the features and benefits of the product you are promoting.
Make it clear how the product can help your subscribers specifically and
always disclose that you are getting paid to help the company generate
sales.
Here is an example of a marketing email for an advertiser that I
might send:
Matthew Paulson
To: subscriber@usgolftv.com
Subject: New irons for your bag
Hey [Name] –
With the spring golf season just two months away, it’s hard to not
start salivating over the opportunity to get on the course. If you’re
like me, you’ve probably already dusted off your golf bag, cleaned
up your clubs, and gotten everything else ready for the season. I
think what I’m most excited about for this year’s golf season is my
brand-new set of irons from XYZ Golf.
I was down in Florida a month or so back, and a buddy had an early
set of the new XYZ irons. They have some of the best grips I’ve
ever seen and have a newly designed clubhead specially made to
increase both speed and accuracy. They also have this amazing little
wedge that has gotten me out of the sand on 100% of the shots I’ve
taken. There are a lot of iron clubs on the market right now, but I
really think the XYZ clubs are the ones to beat.
In fact, XYZ irons are so good that I want to make sure you can get
your set ahead of the season. XYZ’s generally not in stores yet, but
I’ve found one retailer that has 40 full sets she’s ready to sell for just
$299.97 apiece. I don’t think you’ll be able to find a better price
anywhere else.
If you’d like to check out the new XYZ irons, click on the link
below. I also want to let you know that I will receive a small
commission if you purchase using the link below, but I wouldn’t
ever recommend a product or service that I wouldn’t use personally.
Click Here to Get Your XYZ Irons
Matthew Paulson
MarketBeat.com
Writing Content Promotion Emails
If you create a new resource, such as a very long blog post, a new
podcast episode, or a new eBook, send an email to your audience letting
them know it’s available. Don’t assume your subscribers will read every
blog post on your website because that rarely happens. When you have a
great new piece of content for them to consume, let them know via email,
so they won’t miss it and will stay engaged with your mailing list. If you
want your subscribers to promote your content, use a bit of the social
capital you have built up with them, and ask them to share your content.
Remember to include links so that a subscriber can easily share your post
on Facebook as well.
Here’s an example of a content promotion email I might send:
Matthew Paulson
To: subscriber@marketbeat.com
Subject: New resource for aspiring entrepreneurs
Good morning –
One of the hardest challenges that every new entrepreneur makes is
taking the leap and acquiring their first customer. Many new
entrepreneurs get distracted by working on their name, building their
website, creating business cards, reading business books, and going
to conferences. While these things can be fun to do, none of these
things help your business generate revenue.
I’ve always wondered why new entrepreneurs don’t just start
identifying prospects, setting up meetings, and trying to get sales. I
had a discussion the other day with a newer entrepreneur, and he told
me that he doesn’t know how to make a sales call to ask for a
meeting. Certainly, some new entrepreneurs don’t make sales calls
because they are afraid of being rejected, but others simply don’t
know how to generate sales.
If you want to learn the exact steps you need to take and the right
words to say to identify a new prospect, get a sales meeting with
them, and close the deal, I’ve developed a brand new 5,000-word
blog post just for you. It’s titled “The Five Steps of Customer
Prospecting: What to Do and What to Say,” and it’s available at the
link below.
Click Here to Read “The Five Steps of Customer Prospecting”
Enjoy!
Matthew Paulson
Founder, MarketBeat.com
Learn How to Make a Sales Call Here
Writing Feedback Emails
Market research is one of the best uses for your mailing list. Nobody
knows more about what your subscribers want than your subscribers
themselves. Whenever you are thinking about launching a new product, a
new service, or creating another resource for them, always ask for
feedback ahead of time. People love to share their opinions with
strangers, so you’ll probably receive a lot of responses if you take the
time to ask for feedback. Only ask a few questions at a time and leave the
questions open-ended, so they have room to tell you what they really
think.
Here is an example of a feedback email that I might send:
Matthew Paulson
To: subscriber@marketbeat.com
Subject: Quick question?
Hi [Name] –
As a subscriber to MarketBeat Daily Premium and RatingsDB,
you’ve had access to analyst ratings changes, earnings
announcements, and insider trades well before the market opens
each morning.
We’re getting ready to start on the next round of improvements to
our services, and I wanted to get your feedback before we started. If
you could take a moment to provide your thoughts and insight, I
would be immensely grateful.
Here are the questions:
#1 – What do you like most about our services? What do you like
the least?
#2 – Do you feel that MarketBeat Daily Premium is too cluttered?
What could be removed?
#3 – Do you have any ideas or suggestions to improve our daily
newsletter or our research software?
If you’d be willing to help, simply reply to this email with your
feedback.
Thanks in advance,
Matthew Paulson
Founder, MarketBeat.com
Writing Sales and Marketing Emails with AIDA
To write an effective sales and marketing email, you need to take
your subscribers through a series of steps to get them to take a desired
action, such as purchasing a product or service. You first must grab their
attention, create interest in your product or service, instill a personal
desire for your offer using your subscribers’ hopes and fears, and
convince them to act. These four steps make up the acronym AIDA,
which was first penned by advertising pioneer E. St. Elmo Lewis in 1903.
While the concept AIDA was developed in the print era, it continues to
work well as a framework for email copywriting.
The first step is to grab the attention of your readers. In the world of
email marketing, this means getting your subscribers to see and open
your email. Your subscribers may receive as many as one hundred emails
every day. They probably do not read most of the emails they receive and
may only open five to ten messages on any given day. This is why some
of the most engaged email lists in the world only have open rates of 30-
40%. To get consumers to open your emails, you need to stand apart from
the crowd by writing a compelling subject line and using a personal
“from” name. After someone has opened your email, keep their attention
by telling an interesting story, fact, joke, or anything else that someone
can’t help but read.
After getting a subscriber’s attention, you will need to smoothly
transition to the actual purpose of your email, so you can generate
interest for the product or service you’re promoting. You can often do
this through an analogy that ties the content of your email back into the
introduction you used to grab their attention. After the transition, you will
extol the features and benefits of what you are selling your audience and
show them how it can solve a particular problem for them or make their
lives easier.
The next step is to create an emotional desire in your subscribers.
Try to get your users to think about the emotions they feel whenever they
face the problem that your product or service can solve. Also, paint a
picture of a desired future state that subscribers can achieve when they
purchase your product or service. By helping them remember the
negative emotions caused by the problem and showing them what their
life can be like if they purchase your product or service to solve it, you
will help your customers become emotionally ready to purchase.
The final step is to call your subscribers to take a specific action,
which is usually purchasing your product or service. Tell your subscribers
exactly what they need to do to purchase your product and finish your
email by reminding users of the picture you painted of a desired future
state.
Here’s an example of a marketing email that was sent out by
USGolfTV that uses AIDA:
Todd Kolb
To: subscriber@usgolftv.com
Subject: I’m bored out of my mind.
I don’t know about you, but in my house over the holidays, there’s
just not a whole lot to do beyond stuffing our faces full of food and
hearing my grandma share the same story year after year. There’s
rarely anything good on TV besides the occasional football game.
There’s nothing for the serious golf fan to watch and enjoy. That is,
until now.
If you want to start off with a better golf game than you had in the
fall, I’d encourage you to take the time to start watching The Prairie
Secret video training series in your free time during the holidays.
You’ll avoid the usual round of holiday boredom and get some great
ideas to improve your golf game.
When next spring comes around, your golfing buddies will be out of
practice and will be finishing their games several strokes higher than
they finished last fall. You, on the other hand? You lost three strokes
over the winter by doing the drills outlined in The Prairie Secret.
Want to get your copy of The Prairie Secret? Click the link below to
get your copy today.
Click Here to Get Your Copy of The Prairie Secret
Todd Kolb
USGolfTV
The Six Steps to Generating a Sale from Email Marketing
To generate sales from a marketing email, there are six different
steps that people need to take in sequential order to become a customer:
1. A customer must sign up for your mailing list.
2. A customer must become engaged with your content and read the
emails you sent.
3. A customer must receive and open a marketing email.
4. A customer must click a link in your marketing email to your sales
page.
5. A customer must read the sales material for your product or service
on your landing page.
6. A customer must complete the sign-up form to purchase your
product.
As email subscribers work through the six steps of becoming a
customer, many of them are going to drop off the map and will never
become customers. Furthermore, they will likely drop out at different
points along the way. All your subscribers will make it through step one.
Half might make it through step two. Around 15% of your subscribers
might make it through step three, 5% might make it through step four,
while 3% of your subscribers might make it through step five. Finally,
2% of your subscribers might make it through step six.
The key is to get as many subscribers as possible from one step to
the next. If subscribers drop off at any point in these six steps, they will
never become customers. You should work on optimizing all six of these
steps to ensure the highest percentage of subscribers possible make it
from any one step to the next step. The best method is continually
running split-tests at every step of the process. By trying different opt-in
forms, email marketing copy, subject lines, calls-to-action, and landing
page copy over time, you’ll identify the language that will help drive
more sales.
Best Practices to Follow With Your Email
There are several other best practices that you should follow when
sending email to your list:
Don’t Rely on Images
Between 10% and 30% of your users will never click “enable
images” on your emails. Never rely on images to convey key points
in your copy. Use clear and descriptive ALT text on any images that
you do include. You can also consider using CSS styling to make
your ALT text larger and more visible to subscribers that do not
enable images.
Avoid Grammar and Spelling Errors
Poor grammar, capitalization, and spelling can be a huge turn off for
many of your email subscribers. If you want to speak with expert
authority to your audience, you need to do so with proper, clear
writing. No one will believe you are an authority on anything if you
can’t write a complete sentence. Double-check every email you
write for grammar and spelling mistakes and consider having
another person check over your messages or use Grammarly
(grammarly.com) before they are sent out to your subscribers.
Include Multiple Hyperlinks
If you have a specific hyperlink that you want users to click on, add
a total of three hyperlinks to each email. Hyperlink your main callto-action at the bottom of your message body and just above your
email signature. Also hyperlink a few relevant words in the first
paragraph of your email to the page you want users to go to. Finally,
include a final call-to-action below your email signature and in any
“P.S.” that you include with your email.
Avoid Design-Heavy Email Templates
Subscribers are more likely to read email that comes from an
individual person than a faceless company or nonprofit. While
companies frequently use templates in their email, people almost
never do. If possible, avoid using a design-heavy template so that
your emails appear more personal to your subscribers.
Limit Each Email to One Call-to-Action
Don’t try to get your subscribers to take multiple actions in one
email. Each email that you send should have one single purpose and
a single call-to-action that you want them to take. Users are less
likely to respond when they must consider which, if any, of your
calls-to-action that they want to take.
Have a Clear Unsubscribe Link
Don’t try to hide or obscure your unsubscribe link. Have a clear
unsubscribe link that says “Click Here to Unsubscribe” in a normal
font size. If you try to obscure your unsubscribe link, your
subscribers may report your messages as spam, which can put you in
jeopardy with your email service provider if your account generates
too many spam complaints.
Should I Hire a Professional Copywriter?
There are many professional email copywriters that you can pay to
create email marketing campaigns on your behalf. However, you
probably should not hire one, especially if you are just getting started.
Learning to become an effective copywriter takes experience. When
someone else is writing copy for you, you won’t have the opportunity to
practice and learn how to write your copy for yourself. Good copywriters
can be very expensive to hire, which will make it much more difficult to
run a profitable email marketing campaign.
There are two instances where it might be appropriate to hire a
professional copywriter to write email for you.
If your business is already generating more than six figures per year
when you start email marketing, it may be more cost-effective for you to
hire a copywriter. At $200,000 per year, your time is worth about $150.00
per hour. If it takes you three hours to write an email and a copywriter
can do a better job than you at $150.00 per message, go ahead and write a
check to the copywriter.
The other instance is for creating your autoresponder series, but only
if you don’t have much experience writing email, and you can easily
afford the fees. By having a professional copywriter create your
autoresponder series, you’ll have relevant email copy that you can
repurpose as broadcast emails down the line.
Wrap-Up
In this chapter, I’ve put together a basic overview of email
copywriting and a list of best practices to follow when writing email to
your subscribers. Copywriting is a skill that will take a lot of time and
practice to master. Most of the email that you send for the first several
months won’t be very good, and that’s okay. Continue learning and
practicing email copywriting by following experts like John McIntyre
(dropdeadcopy.com), reading marketing email sent out by your
competitors, and consuming educational content about copywriting from
places like Copyblogger (copyblogger.com/blog). Over time, your
copywriting skills will improve and mature, and eventually writing email
to your audience will come naturally.
Action Steps:
Create an avatar that epitomizes a typical subscriber.
Practice writing sales and marketing emails using AIDA.
Know the eight parts of every email and the seven reasons to email
your list.
Identify additional copywriting resources that you can learn from
and rely on in the future.
CASE STUDY #4
USGolfTV
USGolfTV is a digital publishing and television production
company based out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It was founded in 2010
by Todd Kolb, who is a PGA teaching professional. Todd is responsible
for content creation and general business strategy. I was an equity partner
in this company from 2014 to 2017 and was responsible for a variety of
marketing and revenue growth projects during that time, including
growing the company’s mailing list from 5,000 subscribers to over
75,000 subscribers.
As a business, USGolfTV is made up of three primary components:
the USGolfTV TV show, the company’s video training products, and the
company’s website (usgolftv.com). The television show, USGolfTV, is a
regionally syndicated program that is available in about 12 million homes
in 25 states through a variety of cable channels, including Cox, Time
Warner, and Midco Sports Net. The show provides golf tips, product
reviews, and industry trends. It makes a minor profit, but its real value is
that it gives the company a substantial amount of credibility whenever its
owners approach a potential advertiser. Because USGolfTV can give
advertisers exposure on television, in its email newsletter, and on its
website, advertisers are much more likely to consider advertising to their
audience.
The second major component of the business is the company’s video
training products. USGolfTV has produced several web-based video
training courses that help golfers improve a specific part of their game.
These products are primarily through email marketing and working with
affiliates. The USGolfTV website has a pop-up opt-in form to get new
subscribers to opt in to a 5-day video course which will teach them about
a specific part of golf, like putting. After they receive the five videos in
the series, they will receive marketing emails for the full premium video
course associated with the 5-day course. When you buy one of their
premium video courses, you will receive a series of videos featuring Todd
in addition to written instructions to help you implement what you are
learning on the course. These videos are sold and delivered through a
piece of software called ClickFunnels (clickfunnels.com), which serves
both as a landing page service and a product delivery service. These
video training products cost between $27.00 and $235.00 depending on
which program you buy.
The final component of the business is the USGolfTV website,
which serves as the glue that brings all the other parts of the business
together. USGolfTV has a team of 5-7 writers that publish golf news,
product reviews, and other content on USGolfTV.com. The website
receives traffic from all the usual sources, including organic searches,
social media, and news portals like Google News. USGolfTV generates
revenue on the website through Google AdSense, through private
sponsorships, and by gathering email sign-ups, so the company can
promote its own paid products to its audience. The economics of selling
internally produced products on USGolfTV’s website are astonishing. We
know that 5%-10% of visitors will sign up for a free course on the
website, and 3% of those people will buy one of USGolfTV’s premium
courses that has an average sale price of $100.00, so we can take those
numbers and say the business expects to make between $200 and $250
from every 1,000 visitors on its website through email marketing alone.
USGolfTV has done a few things with email marketing particularly
well. The company regularly does email swaps with several different
partners in the golf industry to promote its mailing list and its products.
USGolfTV also periodically pays to be featured on another brand’s email
list to grow its own mailing list and sell its products. USGolfTV has even
traded commercial space on its television show in exchange for email
sends. The golf industry is very much built on relationships, and
USGolfTV’s team has leveraged that reality by using its existing
relationships to attract affiliates and do email swaps.
USGolfTV uses a pop-up opt-in form on its website like the one
used that MarketBeat used for years. We know that customers are more
likely to purchase USGolfTV’s paid video courses if they opt-in to
multiple free video series, so the website rotates lead magnets daily. If
one video series isn’t useful to a reader, the series that gets promoted the
next day might be more interesting to them. The website also includes
several in-post lead forms to promote specific lead magnets that are tied
to the content of the post. The company does not run a co-registration ad
on its “thank you” page, however, because co-registration ads haven’t
taken off on sports websites yet. They do place a display advertisement
unit on “thank you” pages, which does quite well.
I sold my equity interest in the company back to the other owners in
2017 so that I could focus exclusively on MarketBeat. At the time of my
departure from the company, the USGolfTV website received
approximately 100,000 visitors each month and had an email list of more
than 75,000 golfers. Since my departure, the company has continued to
grow and has had found new success with a YouTube channel that has
more than 35,000 subscribers. I continue to be optimistic about
USGolfTV’s prospects and wish Todd, Nick, and the rest of the team the
best of luck in growing their business.
Note: The information in this case study was accurate as of the time
of my departure from USGolfTV in late 2017. Specific numbers
mentioned in this case study, as well as aspects of USGolfTV’s
business model, have changed since I sold my interest in the
company.
CHAPTER SIX
Monetization: Six Ways to Make
Money with Your Mailing List
Building a mailing list serves no purpose if it does not also further
your company’s financial objectives. If you run a for-profit company,
your ultimate goal is to generate new revenue and get more customers
through your email marketing efforts. This chapter will teach you how to
sell more of your company’s products and services through email
marketing and how to generate additional revenue through email
advertising networks and through affiliate marketing.
Sell Your Own Products
Most companies use their mailing lists to market their own products
and services. If someone comes to your website and completes an opt-in
form, they have already expressed interest in your content and are
probably a potential customer for your company’s products and services.
Send emails that educate and inform your subscribers about your
products and services regularly. Don’t assume that your subscribers
already know about what you have to offer, because not everyone pays
equal attention to all the emails you send, and new subscribers are being
added to your mailing list regularly.
If you do have products or services that you can sell to your mailing
list, you are probably better off promoting your own products than
another company’s products, even those you would receive an affiliate
commission for promoting. When you sell your own products and
services, you get to keep 100% of the customer’s payment. When you are
promoting someone else’s product, you may receive as little as 10% of
the revenue generated by a sale.
If you don’t have any products or services that you can sell to your
audience, consider making a course that teaches something to your
subscribers or helps them achieve a specific goal. While the product
creation and launch process is beyond the scope of this book, read my
internet business creation book, Online Business from Scratch
(fromscratchbook.com), for advice on how to create and market your first
product. You can also read Jeff Walker’s book, Launch: How to Sell
Almost Anything Online, Build a Business You Love, and Live the Life of
Your Dreams, for additional guidance on the process of launching your
first product.
Here are some strategies that you can use to generate sales for your
company’s product or service:
Use Your Autoresponder Series
Sprinkle information about your company’s products and services in
your autoresponder series. Subscribers are often most engaged with
your mailing list soon after they first subscribe, so don’t wait more
than a week or two before sending them sales and marketing
material.
Run a Sale
Periodically, consider offering a time-limited discount on one of
your company’s products or services to generate additional sales.
Offer a 20-30% discount on whatever you are promoting, but only
make that discount available for a fixed time period, such as three,
five, or seven days. Send multiple emails during the sale that extol
the features and benefits of your company’s products and services.
On the last day of the sale, send your subscribers an email reminding
them of the deal and making it clear the sale is ending that night. By
having a hard deadline for your sale, potential customers who are on
the fence will be more likely to take action to avoid missing the sale.
Offer Special Bonuses
Another way to add urgency to the purchasing process is offering a
special bonus to customers that purchase by a specific date. It can be
another of your products or a small add-on product that you create to
serve specifically as a bonus. At MarketBeat, we frequently send
users a free copy of my dividend investing book, Automatic Income
(automaticincomebook.com), as a bonus that’s not otherwise
available. A special bonus campaign will operate very similar to a
sale campaign because subscribers will be getting something they
wouldn’t otherwise normally receive and have to take action by a
specific date and time.
Relaunch Existing Products
If you have a product that you launched more than a year ago,
consider adding some new features and benefits and launching it to
your mailing list as a “new and improved” version of your product.
The new version of your product will provide a great excuse to
execute an email marketing campaign as if you were launching a
new product, and subscribers will take a second look at a product
they might have otherwise ignored. Make sure you give all your
existing customers a free upgrade to the new version to avoid any
hard feelings. You can make a relaunch campaign more effective by
offering a sale or a special bonus during the launch period to your
subscribers.
Group Products Together
If your company offers complimentary products and services,
consider creating a campaign where customers can buy two products
at once for a single price. You should offer a slight discount for the
combined product offering and consider adding a bonus that’s only
available to people who purchase both products in a package.
Create New Products
If your existing products and services aren’t getting the sales traction
with your mailing list that they once were, you can always create a
new product. When I was at USGolfTV, we regularly launched new
premium video training courses so that we would have fresh
products and content to promote to our audience. When you have a
new product, you can create buzz with a pre-launch marketing
campaign and generate a level of interest that you otherwise might
not be able to when marketing an existing product.
At MarketBeat, we use our mailing list to sell subscription
information services to our subscriber base. Our cheapest products are
alert services, such as MarketBeat Momentum Alerts, that we sell for
$99/year. We also sell our premium daily newsletter, MarketBeat Daily
Premium, for $199/year and our suite of investment research tools called
MarketBeat All Access for $399/year.
Through our daily newsletter, our autoresponder series, and
broadcast emails that we send to our mailing list, we generate more than
$3 million per year in recurring annual revenue from the subscription
products we sell. We also regularly launch new products, relaunch
existing products, and offer time-limited discounts and bonuses for
customers that buy during campaigns.
Promote Third-Party Products and Services as an Affiliate
There are thousands of companies that will pay you commissions for
any sales that you generate on their behalf, an arrangement known in the
online business world as affiliate marketing. Promoting other companies’
products and services to your mailing list can be an extremely effective
way to generate revenue if you can find a product with an affiliate
program that is a great match for your audience.
Affiliate marketing is my favorite way of selling online advertising.
Because you are only getting paid by the direct value you create for an
advertiser, you can receive outsized compensation when you find
products and services to promote that are a great fit for your audience.
MarketBeat once approached an advertiser who was regularly buying ads
on our website through Google AdWords about developing a direct
affiliate relationship. By moving to a direct deal, we were able to
eliminate both their media buyer’s fees and Google AdWords’ fees. We
also improved the copy to make it more relevant to our readers and were
able to promote their offer in our newsletters and not just on our website.
Within a few months, their monthly spend with MarketBeat had increased
by more than 400%.
There are other benefits to setting up direct affiliate relationship with
advertisers. When an advertiser is paying based on performance, there
will never be requests for discounts when a campaign didn’t perform as
expected. They won’t question how many clicks you sent on a given
campaign, because you are getting paid per sale and not per click. There
are no middlemen taking a cut of your earnings, because you have a
direct relationship with the company you are promoting. You can also
work with your affiliate advertisers to find creative ways to promote their
products and services, such as SMS blasts and push notifications.
Everyone with a mailing list should test promoting affiliate offers to
their audiences. Even if your company produces its own products and
services, you should still consider promoting other companies. You can
only talk about your products so much before your audience gets sick of
hearing about them.
Finding Products to Promote
Finding products and services to promote as an affiliate is a
straightforward process. There are several large advertising networks that
focus exclusively on creating affiliate relationships between advertisers
and publishers. These networks will handle any necessary paperwork,
provide banners and other creative tools to use on your website, serve as
an intermediary in the relationship, and make sure you get paid for your
efforts.
Affiliate networks also make it very easy to find products and
services to promote. They will list advertisers by category and show
which advertisers’ other publishers are currently having the most success
with. Keep in mind that you will have the most success promoting
products closely related to the content that you write about. If you have
an investing website, you want to primarily promote investing-related
services like stock brokerages and research tools. You wouldn’t get good
results promoting unrelated services like web hosting and domain name
registration services.
Here is a list of some of the larger affiliate advertising networks:
Amazon Associates (affiliate-program.amazon.com)
Awin (awin.com)
Click Bank (clickbank.com)
CJ / Commission Junction (cj.com)
eBay Partner Network (partnernetwork.ebay.com)
Flex Offers (flexoffers.com)
Impact (impact.com)
Rakuten Marketing (rakutenmarketing.com/affiliate)
ShareASale (shareasale.com)
If you are overwhelmed by the sheer number of advertisers that list
their products on affiliate networks, you can simplify the process by
looking at what products and services your competitors and other similar
websites are promoting. If several other websites are all promoting a
specific advertiser and they have been for several months, there’s a good
chance they are making good money promoting them.
To identify which network a particular advertiser is using, simply do
a web search for the name of the advertiser followed by the word
“affiliate program,” and the sign-up link will appear more often than not.
How Does an Affiliate Marketing Email Actually Work?
After you have found an advertiser that you want to promote and
have signed up for their affiliate program through an advertising network,
you will be given hyperlinks to use that will track any sales you generate.
They may also provide an image tag that serves as a tracking pixel to
include in your email.
You will write a sales and marketing email to your audience as you
normally would for your company’s products and services. Then use the
hyperlink they provided you as the hyperlink in your call-to-action so that
sales are properly tracked. If they provided a tracking pixel, place it in
your HTML at the bottom of your email, so the number of times the offer
was viewed can be properly tracked by the affiliate program.
How Much Can I Make Through Affiliate Marketing?
With affiliate marketing, payments are made based on the actual
sales that you generate. The amount of money you can make through
affiliate marketing depends on several factors including the size of your
list, the relevance of the product or service to your list, and the
effectiveness of the marketing copy that you use to write a product. If you
have a small list and are ineffectively promoting a product that’s not
relevant to your list, you probably won’t make anything through affiliate
marketing.
If you have a larger list of highly engaged subscribers who trust your
recommendations and you can promote a product or service that’s very
relevant to your audience, you can make tens of thousands of dollars per
month. If you have a list of a few thousand subscribers, you will probably
earn $100-$200 per month through affiliate marketing for the first several
months. Your revenue will steadily increase over time as your list grows
and as you identify products and services to promote that are a good
match for your list.
MarketBeat’s list, which has approximately 3 million subscribers,
generates more than $1 million per month through affiliate advertising
with stock brokerages and financial newsletter publishers. I share this not
to boast, but rather to show that there is a very high ceiling in what
someone with a large email list can earn through affiliate marketing.
What Best Practices Should I Follow as an Affiliate?
There are several best practices that you should follow when
promoting products and services to your audience as an affiliate:
Be Transparent
You should always disclose to your subscribers if you are receiving a
commission for promoting a product or service for honesty,
transparency, and even legal reasons. In the United States, the FTC
requires that you disclose any payment that you receive for
endorsing a product or service. You can read the FTC’s endorsement
guidelines
at
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truthadvertising/advertisement-endorsements.
Promotion Equals Endorsement
If you are promoting a product as an affiliate, you are personally
endorsing that product as something your subscribers should use. If
you wouldn’t personally use a product or service, don’t promote it to
your mailing list. Your subscribers will lose trust in you if you
promote low-quality products and are only concerned with the
affiliate commissions you generate.
Don’t Over-Promote One Product
You will see diminishing returns after you continue to promote the
same product over time. Rotate the products and services that you
promote to avoid overexposing any one advertiser to your mailing
list.
Include a Bonus
To ensure a subscriber signs up for something through your affiliate
link, create a bonus product that’s only available to those who sign
up through your affiliate link. You can use one of your existing
products or create an educational piece of content to serve as your
bonus. Have subscribers forward you the welcome email or the
receipt that they get from the advertiser in exchange for the bonus
product you create.
Follow Program Rules
Each affiliate advertiser will have their own set of program rules.
They may place limitations on the language that you use and the
ways that you promote their product or service. Take the time to read
the rules set by each advertiser to avoid having your relationship
terminated through inadvertently breaking one of their program
rules.
Pat Flynn (smartpassiveincome.com) is a great example of someone
who does affiliate marketing properly through email, his website, and his
podcast. He has established himself as an online business expert and
recommends tools, products, and services to his audience that can help
them build their online businesses. He states that he only promotes
products that he can personally recommend and is generally transparent
when he receives an affiliate commission for promoting something. He
has built such a large audience, and his affiliate marketing is so effective
that the commissions he generates through his promotions have become
far larger than the actual revenue he makes from his other online
businesses. It’s not uncommon for Flynn to generate between $50,000
and $100,000 each month through his affiliate marketing efforts.
Rent Your Mailing List
If you have grown your mailing list to more than 25,000 subscribers,
advertisers may be interested in paying you to send an email to your
mailing list on their behalf. If your mailing list is smaller than 25,000
subscribers, your list may not be large enough to attract the interest of
advertisers yet. Let’s say you have a mailing list of 30,000 subscribers,
and an advertiser agrees to pay $40.00 CPM to email your list. They
would pay you a total of $1,200 to send an email promoting their product
or service. Renting your list to advertisers can be very profitable if you
have built a large mailing list.
Advertisers pay to rent mailing lists in a variety of different ways.
They may pay a mailing list owner a flat fee to send an email to their
mailing list. They may also pay on a cost per thousand impressions
(CPM) basis, a cost per click (CPC) basis, or a cost per action/sale (CPA)
basis. Advertisers will generally want to pay publishers on a performance
basis (CPC or CPA), because that puts the performance risk on the
publisher. Publishers generally want to charge an advertiser a flat fee or
on a CPM basis, because they get paid regardless of whether the email
performs well or not. What advertisers end up paying will be a
negotiation that factors in industry standards and the value created by the
publisher’s email promotions.
Finding Advertisers to Rent Your List
The biggest challenge with renting out your list is finding
advertisers. Unless you are already established as a reputable mailing list
owner with advertisers in your industry or are working with a reputable
advertising agency that sells dedicated emails, you may have trouble
letting advertisers know your list exists and is worth renting. There are
disreputable publishers that try to sell mailings to low-quality, stolen, or
scrapped mailing lists; to avoid trouble, advertisers primarily want to
work with larger publishers that have built a good reputation.
If you are just getting started renting out your mailing list, your best
bet is to find an advertising agency that works with mailing lists in your
industry. You will be able to get a lot more list rentals if you can get a
reputable agency to endorse and promote your mailing list. While an
agency may take a 30%-50% commission on anything they sell, a good
agency will make you far more than they cost you. Their sales team will
be able to get you in front of advertisers that normally wouldn’t talk to
you and will even make deals on your behalf.
When we were first establishing MarketBeat as a brand, we worked
with a variety of finance-specific advertising agencies that sold newsletter
sponsorships and dedicated emails to our mailing lists. These agencies
include Investing Media Solutions, Strikepoint Media, and Investing
Channel. These agencies had existing relationships with large financial
advertisers, represented our list to the advertisers, and did all the billing
work. All we had to do was send the emails and cash checks. Working
with an advertising agency that caters to your niche is a great move early
on because it shortcuts the relationship building process and doesn’t
require you to sell directly.
The other option is to virtually pound the pavement and try to find
advertisers by approaching them directly. You can identify advertisers by
looking for them on your competitors’ websites and mailing lists. If you
are running Google AdSense ads on your website, you can see which
advertisers are frequently showing up on your website and can approach
them directly. You will need to put together a media kit which will
highlight the size and demographic nature of your audience and will
contain a list of various types of advertisements an advertiser can
purchase.
You
can
view
MarketBeat’s
media
kit
at
marketbeat.com/advertising. Approaching advertisers directly can be a lot
of work but may be an effective way to generate list rental deals if you
are a natural seller.
As MarketBeat has grown over the years, we brought on a director
of business development to work directly with advertisers. Once you
reach a certain size, can hire your own sales and implementation team, do
your own billing, and have existing relationships with advertisers, it
makes more sense to go direct with your largest advertisers. Direct
relationships eliminate the commission that advertising agencies take and
allow you to collaborate more creatively with your advertisers.
The Process of Renting Your List
When you make an agreement with an advertiser to rent your
mailing list, there are several steps involved. You and the advertiser will
agree to send an email to a set number of subscribers at a specific date
and time. Several days before the email is scheduled to be sent, they will
send you a copy of the email. You will then send a test email to the
addresses they provide and will approve the message after they make sure
everything looks right and the links are working properly.
On the agreed upon day and time, you will send the email to your
list. A few days after the email has been sent, the advertiser will generally
request performance information about the send, such as total sends, total
deliveries, total opens, and total clicks. You should provide that
information to them in a timely manner. At the end of the month, you or
your advertising agency will invoice them, and they will mail you a check
30 days later.
Run Co-Registration Advertising Units
In the list-building chapter of this book, we discussed co-registration
advertising from the perspective of an advertiser. As a mailing list owner
that collects organic opt-ins from your website, you can also generate
revenue by running a co-registration advertising unit on the “thank you”
page that subscribers see after signing up for your mailing list. After the
user signs up for your mailing list, they will be presented with a list of
additional offers they can also choose to opt in to. If a new subscriber
selects any of the offers listed, you’ll receive a small commission from
the advertiser, and the subscriber’s name and email address will
automatically be passed on to the advertiser.
Co-registration advertising units can be wildly profitable if you
receive a sizable number of opt-ins each month. On a normal page of
your website, a display advertisement from Google AdSense or another
network might yield between $1.00 and $10.00 for every thousand people
that view the ad. A co-registration advertising unit can make anywhere
from $250.00 to $1,250.00 for every thousand views on your “thank you”
page. Users that have just opted into your mailing list are extremely likely
to engage with an advertisement, because they have already demonstrated
they are willing to take action by signing up for your mailing list.
The amount of money you make from co-registration advertising
will vary depending on the niche of your mailing list and the number of
people that sign up for your email list on your website every month.
Advertising networks that offer co-registration ads will often provide an
estimate of what they believe your website can make for every new
subscriber. For lower-value and general-interest mailing lists, you might
be able to make an average of $0.25 for every new subscriber that sees
your co-registration advertising unit. For some specific niches, like
finance and investing, publishers make between $0.50 and $1.25 for
every subscriber that sees their co-registration advertising unit. To
calculate how much money a co-registration advertising unit could make
your business in each month, simply multiply the number of website optins you get each month by the estimated amount of revenue you can make
per view with your co-registration advertising unit.
While adding display ads to your website from a network like
Google AdSense is a straightforward process, getting started with a
company that offers co-registration advertising can be more involved.
There are only a handful of advertising companies that offer coregistration advertising units, and you generally can’t sign up for them by
filling out a form on a website like you can with some networks.
Typically, you will need to contact several co-registration advertising
companies and provide them information about your mailing list and the
demographics of your subscribers. They will give you an estimate of
what they think you can make per impression with your mailing list and
will typically want you to sign a 12-month agreement to run their unit.
Placing ad code on your website for a co-registration unit is also a bit
more involved than putting up a display ad, because you must pass the
subscriber’s information back to the network through your ad tag. You
can find a list of co-registration advertising companies in the list-building
chapter of this book.
If you aren’t collecting many opt-ins per month and co-registration
advertising companies aren’t interested in you, you can also monetize
your “thank you” page with a display advertising unit from Google
AdSense or another display advertising company. Your “thank you” page
should be a relatively clean page with little more than a thank you
message and the display ad centered on your page. While a “thank you”
page with a display ad unit won’t perform quite as well as a coregistration advertising unit, you will find that the ad unit on your “thank
you” page can earn ten to fifteen times more than display ads on other
pages.
At MarketBeat, we work with three different co-registration
advertising companies to run co-registration advertising units on our
“thank you” pages. We also place co-registration ads on interstitial pages
in front of special reports that we promote to our mailing list to generate
additional ad revenue from these units. Through the networks we work
with, we generate more than $100,000 in revenue each month from the
tens of thousands of monthly organic opt-ins that we attract.
Run Banner Ads in Your Newsletter
If you regularly publish a newsletter to your mailing list, there are
advertising networks that will pay you to insert banner advertisements in
your newsletter similar to those that might appear on your website. These
ads are either sold on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression
(CPM) basis. With these advertising networks, you will be given an
HTML snippet to include in your newsletter. They will then sell ad
placements in your newsletter to their network.
Here are some advertising networks that work with newsletter
banner ads:
AdMailr – admailr.com
BuySellAds – buysellads.com
Jeeng (Formerly PowerInbox) – Jeeng.com
LiveIntent – liveintent.com
Newsletters.co - newsletterdirectory.co
Remember to keep a healthy balance between content and ads in
your newsletter. The amount of educational and informative content
should take up significantly more space than the ads. A good rule of
thumb is to place an ad at the top of your newsletter and at the bottom of
your newsletter, leaving the rest of the room for non-advertising content.
If you have too many ads in your newsletter, subscribers will be less
likely to engage with your content in the future.
At MarketBeat, we use a combination of text ads and banner ads in
our daily newsletter. We work with an advertising network that sells textbased, cost-per-click advertisements in our newsletter to several different
financial advertisers. The ads match the look and feel of the rest of our
newsletter and are randomly rotated daily.
Drive Traffic to Your Website
If you have a website with a lot of content, chances are you are
already running display advertisements from networks like Google
AdSense, OpenX, Exponential, Taboola, and others. Whenever visitors
come to your website and view and click on ads, you generate revenue—
so the more visitors, the more money. Consider using your newsletter and
other emails that you send as a traffic generation strategy for your
website. If you can send your subscribers back to your website over and
over again, they will likely view and click on more ads than they would
otherwise.
Wrap-Up
While there are only a handful of different ways to monetize your
mailing list, there are dozens of variations and twists on the six methods
listed in this chapter. There are any number of ways to promote your own
products and promote other companies’ products as an affiliate to your
list. Several co-registration advertising networks are available that you
can run on your website, and several ways exist to generate revenue by
including advertisements in your email content.
Action Steps:
Run a special bonus or sale campaign to promote your company’s
products to your mailing list.
Find two or three products that you can promote to your mailing list
as an affiliate.
Consider placing a co-registration advertising unit on your “thank
you” page.
Try to identify an advertising network that can place banners in your
newsletter and help you rent your mailing list.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Email Deliverability and List
Maintenance
When you send a letter through the U.S. mail with a stamp and a
delivery address, you can be fairly certain your letter is going to arrive
safely in a few days. This isn’t always the case with email. While you
shouldn’t run into many issues if you are following best practices and
sending high-quality content to your mailing list, there’s always the
possibility of being added to a blacklist or facing some other
deliverability issue that will prevent a percentage of the messages from
being delivered or redirect them to subscribers’ spam folders. For this
reason, it’s important to follow email best practices and proactively
monitor your mailing list for any issues that might hinder the
deliverability of your messages.
Use an Email Service Provider (ESP)
To ensure every message possible makes it to the inboxes of your
subscribers, you should always use an email service provider like
MailChimp, Drip, or ConvertKit. If you run your own mail server, you
are likely to make configuration mistakes that will reduce your delivery
rates. It would require finding your own mailing list software and actively
monitoring the reputation of both your sending IP address (the Internet
address that your email delivers from) and your domain name.
Your ESP will handle all the technical infrastructure and make sure
you are following best practices to ensure your messages get to your
subscribers’ inboxes. They will warn you when you have deliverability
issues. They also have relationships with the most popular email
providers and with email blacklist operators. If you run into deliverability
trouble, you are going to want an ESP at your side to help clean things
up.
If you are paying less than $250.00 per month for your email service
provider, know ahead of time that you might not be getting the best
support in the world. ESPs make their real money from selling enterprise
plans to large customers. They aren’t always concerned with keeping
people that have $25.00 or $50.00 per month plans happy with their
services. You will typically receive the level of service that you pay for. If
you are on a lower cost plan, know that you will need to take a more
active role in monitoring and managing your email deliverability rates.
It can also be a good idea to have a backup email service provider in
place. ESPs can shut your account off without notice if they believe you
are spamming or if you inadvertently break another one of their rules.
While this is a rare occurrence for most email service providers, it’s
always good to have a “Plan B” ready to go if your account gets blocked.
Have a low-tier account set up with a second email service provider that
allows you to import your mailing list from another provider. Finally,
make sure you regularly backup your mailing list from your ESP, so you
can move them to another provider if your account gets suspended.
Set Up DNS Verification Records
Email is a technology that was first developed in the 1970s. At the
time, spam, viruses, and fraudulent emails weren’t an issue. The technical
specification for email does not include any security measures and makes
it easy to fake the “from” email address of a message.
As the volume of spam and other fraudulent email has mushroomed,
the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has developed additional
protocols that use your domain’s DNS records to verify the origin of an
email. The four major protocols include Sender Policy Framework (SPF),
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Domain-based Message
Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC), and Brand
Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI).
Internet service providers and other mail providers actively look for
DNS entries that correspond to these email verification protocols. If your
domain name does not have SPF and DKIM records set up, or if they are
not set up properly, mail providers will often put your messages in your
subscribers’ spam folders. If they find other things wrong with your email
or see that the IP address sending your email is on a blacklist, they may
not deliver your messages at all.
You may or may not need to set up SPF records for your domain
name depending on how your email service provider functions. Many
ESPs will send email using one of their domains, which allows them to
automatically add SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records without any
intervention on your behalf. You will want to read your email service
provider’s documentation about them to determine whether you need to
manually add SPF and DKIM to your DNS records.
If you are paying less than $100.00 per month, your ESP is probably
sending mail using one of their domain names on your behalf. If you are
using a high-end plan and your ESP supports what’s known as white
labeling, you may need to add SPF and DKIM records to your domain’s
DNS records.
Here are some domain authentication guides put together by major
ESPs. Read the guide associated with your email service provider to get
the information most relevant to you:
AWeber - help.aweber.com/hc/en-us/articles/204026716-What-sEmail-Authentication-How-Does-It-Apply-To-MeCampaign Monitor - https://help.campaignmonitor.com/emailauthentication
Constant Contact https://knowledgebase.constantcontact.com/articles/KnowledgeBase
/34717-SPF-Self-Publishing-for-Email-Authentication?lang=en_US
ConvertKit - https://help.convertkit.com/en/articles/2502558-usinga-verified-domain-for-email-sending
Drip - https://help.drip.com/hc/en-us/articles/4424702626829Email-Setup
GetResponse - https://www.getresponse.com/help/what-is-dkimand-how-do-i-configure-it.html
iContact - https://kb.icontact.com/hc/en-us/articles/360025667951Email-Authentication-DKIM-SPF-and-DMARC-Information
MailChimp https://mailchimp.com/developer/transactional/docs/authenticationdelivery
SendGrid - https://docs.sendgrid.com/ui/account-and-settings/spfdkim
SPF Records
Sender Policy Framework, better known as SPF, is an email
validation technology that detects mail spoofing by allowing ISPs and
other email services to verify whether any given email from a domain
name has been authorized by the administrators of that domain. A domain
owner will publish a list of IP addresses and other domains authorized to
send mail on their behalf as a specially formatted text DNS record.
Whenever a mail server receives an incoming message, they can use a
domain’s SPF records to verify that the email was sent by a server with
permission to send email on behalf of that domain.
If your email service provider sends out mail using its own domain,
you don’t have to worry about setting up SPF records. If your email
service provider sends out mail using your domain name or supports
white labeling, then setting up appropriate SPF records for your domain
is mandatory.
While there’s a lot of technical jargon surrounding SPF and other
DNS verification tools, setting them up isn’t all that difficult. For
example, I use SendGrid as my primary email service provider. In order
to tell the world that SendGrid has permission to email on behalf of my
domain name, I would need to use “v=spf1 include:sendgrid.net ~all” as
the text in my SPF record. The “include:sendgrid.net” indicates that
SendGrid can send email on my behalf and the “~all” indicates that other
sources claiming to be sending mail on behalf of my domain may not be
trustworthy.
To find the appropriate SPF record for your email service provider,
simply do a web search for the name of your email service provider
followed by “SPF.” Once you have identified the appropriate record, you
will need to log in to your domain name registrar and add the appropriate
record.
Many email service providers will walk you through this process as
part of your initial setup with specific instructions and step-by-step
guides. If that’s not the case, there are dozens of videos on YouTube
which will show you how to add SPF records to your domain. You can
use a tool published by MX Toolbox to verify the placement of your SPF
records, which is located at mxtoolbox.com/spf.aspx.
DKIM Records
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is another email validation
technology that verifies a sender has permission from a domain’s
administrators to send email on behalf of a particular domain.
Additionally, DKIM allows messages to be individually signed using
public key encryption so a recipient mail server can verify a message has
not been modified during transport. Any DKIM enabled email will
include a digital signature that an email server can use, along with a
domain’s public DKIM encryption key to ensure the message received is
identical to the message that was originally sent. Like SPF records,
DKIM records are placed in a domain’s DNS records. Most major email
service providers sign their outgoing mail with DKIM, including Gmail,
Outlook.com, Yahoo, and AOL.
If your email service provider uses its own domain name to send
mail on your behalf, DKIM keys will already be set up without any work
on your part. If your email service provider sends mail using your domain
(sometimes known as white labeling), you should set up DKIM records in
your domain’s DNS records to maximize deliverability rates. Unlike SPF
records, which are usually the same for every user of an email service
provider, DKIM keys must be generated on a per domain basis. You will
need to acquire DKIM DNS records directly from your email service
provider and copy them into your DNS records. You can use a separate
tool published by MX Toolbox to verify the placement of DKIM records,
which is located at mxtoolbox.com/dkim.aspx.
DMARC Records
Domain-based
Message
Authentication,
Reporting,
and
Conformance (DMARC) is a newer protocol that builds upon the DKIM
and SPF records used to detect mail spoofing. Placing a DMARC record
in your domain tells mail providers that your domain is protected by SPF
and DKIM authentications. DMARC records also provide instructions to
mail servers relating to how messages that can’t be properly authenticated
should be handled. A domain owner can use a DMARC record to instruct
mail service providers to either put messages that fail authentication into
a user’s junk mail folder or not deliver them at all.
In most cases, it’s probably not necessary to add DMARC records to
your domain. While SPF and DKIM records validate that an email comes
from your domain name, DMARC merely provides instructions regarding
what to do with messages that can’t be authenticated. They probably
won’t positively impact your email deliverability and can also cause
legitimate email to be rejected if they are not set up properly.
At MarketBeat, our DMARC record is currently “v=DMARC1;
p=quarantine; pct=100; rua=mailto:dmarcreports@analystratings.net;”.
This tells email service providers to quarantine messages that do not pass
authentication and forward a copy of them to the special inbox that we
have setup. Setting up a special reporting email address in your DMARC
record allows you to verify that your authentication is working and gives
you a heads up when someone might be trying to spoof your email
sending domain or if your email sends are not properly authenticating.
Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI)
Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is a relatively
recent email specification that allows for the use of brand logos within
supported email clients. The BIMI group (bimigroup.org) is a working
group setup by major email providers including Google, Yahoo,
SendGrid, FastMail, MailChimp, and others to encourage the adoption of
the BIMI standard among email service providers and email senders.
The BIMI specification requires an email sender to have existing
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records setup for their sending domain. A
sender’s DMARC record must also either be set to “quarantine” or
“reject” non-authenticated email. This is a safety measure so that a
brand’s logo is not displayed on email that may not have come from the
brand. Some email service providers, most notably Gmail, also require a
verified mark certificate (VMC) from DigiCert or Entrust which certifies
that the logo in the BIMI record is associated with a given brand and
domain name.
To receive a VMC, you must also have your logo trademarked which
can take several months. Finally, BIMI records require that the image you
specify is in the scalable vector graphics (SVG) format so that your logo
can scale to any size required.
MarketBeat’s BIMI record is currently setup to “ v=BIMI1;
l=https://www.analystratings.net/images/marketbeat-bimi.svg;”. As of the
publication of the third edition of this book, MarketBeat does not have a
verified mark certificate (VMC) setup. While we have the MarketBeat
name trademarked, we never bothered to trademark the signature
MarketBeat “M”, which is what we use for our BIMI logo. We are in the
process of trademarking the MarketBeat “M” so that we can purchase a
VMC.
For most email senders, I recommend setting up a basic VIMI record
because that will show your logo in some ESPs, including Yahoo.
Trademarking a logo and purchasing a VMC will take months and likely
cost thousands of dollars, so I only recommend large brands pursue a
VMC.
If you want your logo to show up to Gmail users next to your
messages, but don’t want to mess with getting a VMC, there is a shortcut
to displaying your logo with your email that many email senders have
discovered. Simply create a Google account for the email address that
you send mail from and upload a profile picture to your account. The
picture can either be a picture of you or your brand’s logo and it can even
be animated if you desire.
When you send out an email blast from your ESP, your Google
profile picture will be shown to users next to your messages as long as
your sending email address matches your Google account’s email
address. Please note that you can create Google accounts for email
addresses that do not end with @gmail.com, but you will need to be able
to receive a message and click on a confirmation link to confirm your
account.
Single Opt-In vs. Double Opt-In
When a subscriber first signs up for your mailing list, you may or
may not require the subscriber to click on a link in a confirmation email
to confirm their subscription. A mailing list that requires a subscriber to
click through on a confirmation is known as a “double opt-in” mailing
list, because users first opt-in on your website and then opt-in again
through the link in your confirmation email. Mailing lists that simply add
new users to its subscriber list without sending a confirmation email are
known as single opt-ins.
Some email service providers (ESPs) require their customers to
operate double opt-in mailing lists and will not add a new subscriber to
your mailing list unless they click a link in a confirmation email. Other
ESPs are more flexible and allow you to choose between requiring a
single opt-in or a double opt-in. If your ESP requires a double opt-in, you
don’t have much of a say in the matter. If you have a more flexible ESP,
you will have to decide whether a single opt-in is sufficient or if you want
to require a double opt-in.
For many years, requiring a double opt-in was seen as a best practice
for email marketers. By requiring a double opt-in, you know that every
subscriber signing up for your mailing list wants to receive messages
from you, because they have to click a link in a confirmation email that’s
specific to their email account to verify that they want your messages.
Statistics show that confirmed opt-in mailing lists receive better than
average open rates, fewer bounces, and fewer issues with deliverability,
primarily because bad email addresses don’t get added to double opt-in
mailing lists.18
With a single opt-in mailing list, a bad actor can easily subscribe
other people to your mailing list by entering their email addresses into
your opt-in forms. It’s also possible that people are inadvertently added to
mailing lists when a new subscriber accidentally enters a typo into an optin form. While these inadvertent opt-ins are rare, they have been used as a
reason for some ESPs to require mailing list operators to use double optins.
During the last few years, the tide has been shifting among
marketers to favor only requiring a single opt-in. Single opt-in proponents
argue that it’s not in the best interest of marketers to make it harder for
subscribers to sign up for their mailing lists. Opt-in confirmation rates
have been falling during the last few years, which has led double opt-in
mailing list operators to wonder if they are losing subscribers that would
otherwise be engaged and interested in their content.
Single opt-in mailing lists generally grow much faster than double
opt-in mailing lists. While they might have lower open rates and higher
bounce rates, single opt-in mailing lists tend to have a higher total
number of engaged subscribers.
At MarketBeat, we do not require a double opt-in. We believe we
would lose too many subscribers before they have a chance to decide if
they like our content. Instead, we include a very prominent opt-out link in
our welcome email and use data provided by our email service provider
to automatically remove invalid and spam-reporting email addresses from
our mailing list.
We also use engagement metrics to automatically remove inactive
subscribers. If we can’t confirm that a user has opened an email from us
in the first 21 days of their subscription, we remove them from our
mailing list. Even though we don’t require a double opt-in, we maintain
an average deliverability rate of 99.5% and an average open rate of 20%,
because we automatically clear out invalid and inactive email addresses
from our mailing list.
User Engagement is King
Major email providers, including Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and AOL,
are increasingly focusing on how users are engaging with your messages
to determine whether your messages will appear in your subscribers’
inboxes or their junk mail folders. If a user opens an email, replies to an
email, or clicks on a link in an email, an ISP knows that the user is
engaged with the message and probably wanted to receive it. If a
subscriber regularly deletes or simply ignores an email, it’s probably a
spam message or another email that a subscriber didn’t want to receive.
Email providers will look at the aggregate engagement data of all
their subscribers over time to determine the quality and relevance of
email sent by a given domain name and IP address.
For example, if you send an email to 1,000 people at a particular
email provider and only five of them open your message, the email
provider is likely to believe their users probably don’t want your email
and may put future emails that you send in their users’ spam folders. On
the other hand, if you send an email to 1,000 people at an email provider
and 400 of them open the message and click on a link in the email, the
email provider will know that their users are engaged with your content
and that future messages you send should be placed in their users’
inboxes.
To maximize your deliverability rates over time, you will want to try
and write email in such a way that encourages users to be engaged with
your content as measured by the metrics that mail providers use to track
engagement—opens, clicks, and replies. Use engaging subject lines to
persuade users to open your email. Include several links in each email
with a clear call-to-action. Most importantly, try to get users to
periodically reply to your messages. You can do this by asking your
subscribers for their feedback and having them provide their answers by
replying to your messages.
You should also actively remove invalid, inactive, and spamreporting email addresses from your mailing list to keep your engagement
rates high. Remove users that report your messages as spam from your
mailing list. They probably don’t want to receive your messages and
receiving too many spam reports can jeopardize your relationship with
your email service provider.
If a subscriber’s email address gets returned as invalid (sometimes
referred to as a hard bounce), you should remove their email address from
your mailing list, because they are never going to receive your message
regardless of how many times you try.
Finally, you should remove any subscriber from your mailing list
that has not opened any of your messages within the last 12 months. If
you mail your users every day, remove any subscriber that hasn’t opened
an email from you in the last 90 days. Having extremely inactive
subscribers on your mailing list will hurt your average engagement rates.
Plus, it is not worth paying your email service provider to email
subscribers that are never going to open your messages.
The importance of user engagement rates cannot be understated. The
single best improvement we have ever made at MarketBeat to our
deliverability program is mailing less frequently to inactive subscribers.
Most of our email blasts are now only delivered to users that have
engaged with our messages in the last 30 days. Every few weeks, we will
send one message to our entire list regardless of their last activity date to
try to get inactive users back onto our 30-day actives list. By only
emailing our most active users most of the time, we are getting better
open rates, lower spam folder rates and are spending less on email
delivery with our email service provider.
Tracking User Engagement in a Post-MPP World
Removing inactive users from your mailing list, a process known as
sunsetting, is an incredibly effective way to increase your email
engagement and improve deliverability. For this to work, you need to
know which users are actively engaged with your list and which have
gone dormant. Prior to Apple’s implementation of Mail Privacy
Protection (MPP), this was a straightforward task because you could see
which users were active based on their date of last open. Now that open
rate data is less reliable than it used to be, marketers must rely on other
metrics to measure user activity and engagement.
These are the other metrics that we have available to determine user
activity and engagement:
Last Click – When did the user last click on a link in an email?
Last Verified Open – When did the user last verifiably open an
email? Email service providers can differentiate between real and
automated tracking pixel firings.
Last Website Visit – When did a user last visit our website?
Last Date of User Activity – When did a user engage with your
brand in any way? (Website usage, app usage, SMS clicks, email
clicks, etc.)
Here’s how MarketBeat has adapted its email engagement and
sunsetting practices with the launch of iOS 15:
New User Grace Period
New users get daily emails for the first 30 days regardless of their
other activity. If they do not confirm their subscription, click on a link in
an email, or take some other activity to show they are engaging with
MarketBeat within the first 30 days, we permanently unsubscribe them
from our email list.
Last Click
Clicks tend to be much more valuable to list managers than opens,
but they also happen less frequently than opens. We email everyone daily
who has clicked on a link from MarketBeat in the last 90 days, regardless
of other email activity.
Last Date of User Activity
This serves as a sufficient proxy for email opens. We email anyone
that has verifiability opened an email in the last thirty days, logged
into our website, or shown some other form of activity. After 30
days of inactivity, we reduce users to weekly emails unless they have
clicked on a link an email in the last 90 days. After 90 days of
inactivity, we will continue to email them monthly to try to get them
to re-engage with the list.
When iOS 15 launched in late 2021, we were expecting MPP to
create a major shift in the landscape of email marketing, but it has largely
been business as usual. We found that using the alternative metrics listed
above were comparable to using pre-MPP open rate data. We try to email
about the same percentage of our list daily that we did in a pre-MPP
world, we now just arrive at which users are active and which users are
inactive using slightly different metrics.
As of the publication of this book in mid-2022, there are a few best
practices emerging about list management in a post-MPP world. First,
marketers should ignore automated opens triggered by MPP because they
do not indicate user engagement. Your ESP may likely already be
ignoring these automatic opens. Second, marketers should increasingly
rely on click data and other user activity data to determine which users
are active and which are not. Finally, open rate data is still valuable if you
can effectively exclude automated opens.
Email deliverability is more of an art than a science because the data
we have to work with is imperfect, and ESPs are regularly changing the
criteria that they use to determine whether a domain is a good sender or
considered a spammer. This was true prior to the launch of MPP, and it is
also true today. List management best practices for a post-MPP email
marketing landscape will continue to evolve over time as marketers
gather more data and figure out new ways to identify which users are
active and which are not.
Your ESP’s Role in Deliverability
The level of assistance your email service provider will offer
regarding deliverability is generally proportional to the monthly fee that
you are paying. As an enterprise customer of SendGrid, my dedicated
sending IP addresses and my domains are automatically checked against
blacklists daily. If they see any issues, they will automatically file a
removal request on my behalf.
MarketBeat has a dedicated account representative that can
personally intervene with any issues we have, and we also receive email
notifications if our deliverability rate drops below a certain percentage so
we can take remedial action. While having additional delivery monitoring
and blacklist remediation services are nice, they are usually only
available to very high-end customers that send hundreds of thousands of
messages each month. If you are paying under $100.00 per month to your
email service provider, you will need to take a more proactive role in the
deliverability of your email by regularly monitoring your deliverability
rates and checking for blacklist issues.
Check for Reputation, Blacklist, and Deliverability Issues
The most important thing that you can do to ensure your emails
continue to make it into your subscribers’ inboxes over the long term is
proactively monitor for issues on a regular basis. Your domain name or
the IP address that sends your email can be added to a blacklist at any
date and time without any kind of notice. For this reason, it’s important to
set up a weekly or bi-weekly plan to verify that your messages are getting
properly delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes.
Here are the recommended steps you should follow each week to
monitor your deliverability rates:
Review Statistics Provided by Your ESP
Your email service provider will generate delivery statistics for each
email that you send. Review the statistics for all the emails you sent
in the last week. If your average bounce rate increases by one
percent or more, or if your average delivery rates fall by one percent
or more, your domain or sending IP address may have been added to
a blacklist.
Use MultiRBL to Check for Blacklist Issues
MultiRBL (multirbl.valli.org) can check your domain name or the IP
address that sends your email against 224 known blacklists. There
are several other online tools that check for blacklists, but MultiRBL
is by far the most comprehensive. If your ISP has assigned you a
dedicated IP address, you will need to check both your domain name
and the IP address assigned by your ESP for delivery issues. If you
don’t have a dedicated IP address, you will only need to check your
domain name against MultiRBL, because your ESP will
automatically monitor their shared IP addresses for blacklist issues.
Note that smaller ESP service plans generally do not include a
dedicated IP address.
Review Your Recent Bounced Messages
Your ESP should provide a log of recent bounced messages, along
with a message from the recipient’s email server as to why the
message couldn’t be properly delivered. You should scan through
this list every week to identify any potential blacklist issues. If you
see a similar error message appear several times in a row, you should
take the time to identify and address the issue. If you find that your
delivery rates are dropping, your bounced messages log will usually
help you identify the root cause.
Check Your Sender Score (Optional)
SenderScore (senderscore.org) compiles a massive amount of email
data from ISPs and other mail providers. Their free reporting tool
can warn you about several deliverability issues relating to your
sending IP address, such as spam reports, blacklists, and spam traps.
If you haven’t received a dedicated IP address from your email
service provider, you can skip this step.
Check for Email Provider Specific Issues (Optional)
Consider creating a new account with Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo,
and AOL for the sole purpose of subscribing to your mailing list to
see if any messages show up in your spam folder. If you regularly
see messages sent to a certain email provider showing up in a spam
folder, you probably have a deliverability issue that needs to be
addressed. If you want to automate this process, you can use a
service called MailMonitor (mailmonitor.com), which will tell you
whether or not you have any deliverability issues with specific ISPs
and email providers. At $79.00 per month, MailMonitor is probably
only worth paying for if you have a list of 25,000 subscribers or
more. Large senders can look into a tool called eDataSource
(edatasource.com) that provides more advanced deliverability
monitoring tools.
Place a recurring note in your calendar on the same day every week
to check for deliverability issues. The process only takes five minutes but
can be easy to forget if you don’t set a calendar reminder.
What to Do When You Get Blacklisted
If you have a large mailing list, you are inevitably going to land on a
blacklist at some point. There are hundreds of blacklists maintained on
the web, and each has its own specific set of guidelines that can cause
your domain name or sending IP address to be blacklisted. Invariably, too
many users will click a “report spam” button, or you will send too many
bounced messages and your domain or IP will get added to a blacklist.
When this happens, don’t let it ruin your day. Many blacklists are
only used by a very small number of email services. Some blacklists may
not impact your deliverability at all. MarketBeat’s sending domain is
constantly getting put on Polish blacklist, but it doesn’t concern us given
that Poland is not one of our key markets. Getting placed on a widely
used blacklist, such as Spamhaus, Spamcop, or Barracuda, will negatively
impact your deliverability and warrants immediate action to remedy the
issue.
In order to get yourself removed from a blacklist, you typically need
to complete a short form on the blacklist operator’s website. You can
usually find the link to the removal form in your log of recent bounced
messages or through MultiRBL’s blacklist scanner.
If you can’t find the link to the removal form or can’t seem to get
yourself removed from a blacklist, email your email service provider’s
support address and ask for help. Sometimes, an ESP can get your
domain or sending IP address removed from a blacklist when you cannot
get the job done yourself. If an organization wants money to remove your
domain name or IP address from their blacklist, I do not recommend
paying their fee. These blacklists tend to impact a very small percentage
of users and most professionals in the email deliverability community do
not see them as credible.
Reduce Spam Complaints
Most ISPs and other mail providers include a “report spam” link that
allows their users to mark an email as spam. When a user clicks that
button, the message will be moved into the user’s spam folder, and your
ESP will be notified of the spam complaint.
Your email service provider will want you to maintain a spam
complaint rate of less than 0.1%. This means for every 10,000 emails you
send, you should receive at most 10 spam complaints. If your complaint
rate is consistently higher than 0.1%, your email service provider may
intervene and shut down your account or ask you to make changes to
your sending practices and reduce your complaint rate.
To keep your complaint rate below 0.1%, you should make the
process to unsubscribe from your mailing list as easy as possible. Make
sure there is a link to unsubscribe from your mailing list in every email
and that the link works properly. If your spam complaint rate is too high,
you can reduce the number of spam complaints you receive by placing an
unsubscribe link in both the header and the footer of your email.
Many email service providers will automatically add a “list
unsubscribe” header to your emails, which will allow email providers to
add their own unsubscribe button near the “Report Spam” button on your
messages. An unsubscribe header is a hidden field in an email that
provides technical instructions relating to how a subscriber can request to
be removed from your mailing list. Using an unsubscribe header is
quickly becoming a best practice and can help you avoid many spam
complaints. If your ESP does not automatically add an unsubscribe
header to your messages already, you can learn how to implement an
unsubscribe header by visiting list-unsubscribe.com.
Check Outgoing Emails for Issues
Whenever you are getting ready to send a broadcast email to your
mailing list, you should check the message for any potential issues by
using your email service provider’s spam check tool. If your ESP does
not provide a spam checking tool, there are free services such as Mail
Tester (mail-tester.com). These tools will serve as an early warning
system and let you know if any questionable content or formatting exists
in your messages that are likely to set off a spam filter.
For example, messages that promise users they can make a lot of
money or messages that reference erectile dysfunction medications are
almost always spam. Spam filters know this and will filter them out
accordingly. If you inadvertently put too many dollar signs in your email
or make a joke about Viagra, spam checking tools will warn you that the
content in your email may be an issue before you press the send button.
Schedule Your Messages for Optimal Engagement
When sending a broadcast email message to your audience, you may
be naturally inclined to send it immediately after you finish writing it
regardless of the time or day. However, there are specific days of the
week and times of day that you can send a message to maximize the
number of people that see and open them.
Many email marketers believe that Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and
Thursdays are the best days of the week to send email. Your subscribers
are generally at work on those days and will be actively checking their
email. During the weekend, they are less likely to be at their computers
and are less likely to open messages. If you send an email on a Saturday
morning and a subscriber doesn’t check their messages until Monday
morning, your message may be buried below 100 other received emails.
If possible, try to send your messages at the beginning of the
workday (around 8:00 AM) or toward the end of the workday (around
4:00 PM) when your subscribers are more likely to be checking their
email. If supported by your ESP, segment your mailing list by time zone,
so that your subscribers will receive your message at 8:00 AM or 4:00
PM in their local time. At MarketBeat, we don’t have the capability to
segment by time zone. We generally send messages at 9:00 AM Eastern
Time, so most of the United States will receive our messages at or near
the beginning of the workday.
Dealing with Gmail’s Multiple Inboxes
In 2014, Gmail began separating its user’s inboxes into three
separate tabs. In addition to a user’s primary inbox, messages from social
networking sites are getting put into their own tab, and messages that
Gmail considers to be marketing material are sent into a tab called
“Promotions.”
Because users don’t see emails that are put into the promotions tab
by default, some email marketers have noticed that their open rates
among Gmail users have declined significantly after this change was
rolled out. Some email marketers have panicked over this change because
they fear they are going to lose sales due to lower open rates and because
they believe their messages are unfairly landing in the promotions tab.
While Gmail’s multiple tabs are a concern for email marketers, there
are a couple of proven ways that marketers can get their messages back in
user’s primary inboxes. The first thing that you can do is send an email to
your Gmail subscribers and ask them to drag your message from the
“promotions” tab to the “primary” tab, so they won’t miss out on any of
the great content you plan on sending them. You might also want to
include a quick YouTube video that shows people how to do this to make
the process dead simple.
The second thing that you can do to get back in your subscribers’
“primary” tab is to get them to reply to your messages. If a subscriber
replies to your messages, Gmail will be more likely to believe your
messages are important and will put them in the subscriber’s “primary”
tab. The best time to ask users for a reply is in your welcome message.
Simply include a short message like, “Could you reply to this message to
let me know that you’ve received it? I want to make sure that there aren’t
any issues with your subscription,” in your first welcome email. While
not everyone will reply, many will.
Gmail and other email providers will continue to develop their email
interfaces over time. Don’t panic when a major email service provider
changes how email is presented to their subscribers. Marketers always
find ways to adapt to new features and interface changes that email
providers introduce.
Having major problems? Hire a consultant.
If your emails are consistently not making it into users’ inboxes and
you have done everything else in this chapter to improve your
deliverability, it may be time to bring in a deliverability professional to
audit your email practices. In the summer of 2018, our messages had very
poor deliverability at Hotmail/Outlook. We tried everything we could
think of to improve our engagement rates and keep Hotmail happy, but
nothing worked.
We ended up hiring SendGrid’s deliverability team
(sendgrid.com/marketing/delivery-consult) to do a complete audit of our
email program and they provided specific recommendations to get us
back in Hotmail’s good graces. SendGrid’s team suggested that we only
email users that have opened messages in the last two weeks for about a
month, which demonstrated good engagement rates to Hotmail. They
then filled out a mitigation form that Microsoft makes available to ESPs
and our inbox rates at Hotmail are now on par with other email service
providers.
It’s very unlikely that we would have ever been able to develop this
deliverability improvement program by ourselves, because email
deliverability is a very deep rabbit hole and the only way to really know
how to keep a specific email service provider is to live and breathe
deliverability problems like deliverability consultants do. Deliverability
consultants can cost between $1,000 and $10,000 for a one-time
engagement, but paying the fee was well worth it to make sure that our
Hotmail subscribers receive our messages.
Wrap-Up
While it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the technical
components of email deliverability, you don’t have to become an expert
overnight.
Many deliverability issues won’t surface until you have built a large
subscriber list and you begin to send a lot of email. Follow the basic
monitoring recommendations outlined in this chapter, and you’ll know
right away if there’s a problem that needs to be addressed.
There are several resources available, such as SendGrid’s
Deliverability Guide19, which can help you learn about the intricacies of
email deliverability and help you solve any deliverability issues you run
into. If you can’t figure out how to fix a deliverability issue on your own,
your ESP can always step in to help, too.
Action Steps:
Use an email service provider to send out every message to your
mailing list.
Set up appropriate SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records if required by
your ESP.
Decide whether you want to require a single opt-in or a double optin.
Create a weekly or bi-weekly calendar reminder to check for
deliverability issues.
Periodically remove users that have not opened an email from you in
the last 12 months.
Use Mail Tester or another tool to check for potential issues before
sending broadcast emails to your mailing list.
CASE STUDY #5
Oliver Wicks
Oliver Wicks (oliverwicks.com) is a direct to consumer (D2C)
business that sells made-to-measure suits online. They produce and sell a
variety of formal men’s clothing products, including coats, pants, shoes,
scarves, ties, pocket squares, suspenders, and chino pants. They are
known for offering free alterations as well as free shipping and free
returns. Their slogan is “The fit that suits you.”
I had the opportunity to speak to William Morris, Oliver Wicks’ key
account manager, about the company’s email marketing strategies. Oliver
Wicks used MailChimp as its email service provider under its previous
management, but recently switched to Klaviyo because it is better suited
for e-commerce businesses than MailChimp is. Oliver Wicks is
leveraging Klaviyo’s Shopify integration and marketing automation tools
to generate more sales for their business.
Opt-ins are gathered by the company through a pop-up opt-in form
that appears after users have been on their website for a few minutes.
Oliver Wicks also has a footer opt-in on their website and use exit-intent
opt-in forms as well. The company offers 10% off a customer’s first order
as a lead magnet for opting in. Customers can opt-in to receive email
notifications when an out-of-stock item comes back into stock. Morris
noted that out-of-stock notifications are especially effective at gathering
new opt-ins that later convert to sales.
The company sends one email to their list every week on Thursdays
when they are not running a sale. Their weekly emails include new fabric
releases, informational newsletters, seasonal promotions and sales, and
styling tips. They also did a charity campaign where 15% of sales were
donated to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. “We don’t believe in aggressive
sales pitches. Rather, we aim to provide interesting email content to
promote genuine likeability of our brand, while offering authentic advice
and opinions on dressing like a gentleman and how to wear a suit well,”
said Morris.
Oliver Wicks has an email list of approximately 21,000 subscribers.
They also have an autoresponder series for new subscribers that
highlights the company’s brand, key messaging, and core products. The
company does not yet have a cart abandonment series or an upsell series
in place, but plans on adding both soon. Leveraging multi-day sale
campaigns is Oliver Wicks’ most effective way at generating sales
through email marketing. The company does a “Black Friday” campaign
each November and a “Christmas in July” campaign each July that offers
a site-wide discount on products. The company also does flash sales that
run from a Thursday to a Monday that contains a specific offer, such as a
getting a free tie with the purchase of a suit.
Oliver Wicks gets an average open rate of 44.5%, indicating a strong
affinity between the company’s customers and its brand. The company
gets approximately a 3% clickthrough rate and makes about $5,000 each
time a marketing email is sent out. Morris added, “We feel that we see the
benefit of this when we look at our marketing stats; our email campaigns
score consistently high open rates, with low spam/unsubscribe
complaints. Our brand revolves around loyal repeat customers, and
interestingly, our direct sales performance from email marketing is fairly
low.”
“We see the bigger picture here—our friendly approach to customer
engagement, in the long run, often leads to repeat customers because
they’ve become fond of us in a very natural, organic fashion,” Morris
concluded.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Legal Aspects of Email Marketing
While email marketing and other aspects of Internet businesses can
sometimes feel like you are operating in the Wild West, email marketing
is regulated in the United States, Canada, Europe, and in some other
developed countries. You will want to learn about your country’s specific
regulations regarding email marketing, so you can stay in compliance
with the law and avoid getting hit with hefty penalties for unknowingly
committing violations.
Before we dive into some of the regulatory environment surrounding
email marketing, I should disclaim that I am not an attorney or any kind
of legal expert. I believe I have a good understanding of the laws that
impact email marketing, but a competent attorney or the government may
have a different understanding of the law than I do. If you are planning on
doing anything that may skirt the edge of any of the laws mentioned in
this chapter, please seek the advice of a competent legal professional.
CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (United States)
Congress passed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited
Pornography and Marketing Act in 2003, better known as the CANSPAM Act. CAN-SPAM establishes a basic set of rules for all
commercial email. Each separate violation of the CAN-SPAM Act can
result in penalties of up to $16,000, so it’s important to make sure your
messages stay compliant with the law.
The Federal Trade Commission has put together a guide for
businesses titled “CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business,”
which is located at https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/canspam-act-compliance-guide-business. The guide outlines the main
requirements of CAN-SPAM and provides a series of frequently asked
questions that clarify different components of the legislation. I
recommend every mailing list owner in the United States read this guide.
Here are some of the main requirements of CAN-SPAM listed in the
guide:
1. Don’t use false or misleading header information.
Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information—
including the originating domain name and email address—must be
accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the
message.
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines.
The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
3. Identify the message as an ad.
The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must
disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an
advertisement.
4. Tell recipients where you’re located.
Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This
can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve
registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve
registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established
under Postal Service regulations.
5. Tell recipients how to opt-out of receiving future email from
you.
Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of
how the recipient can opt-out of getting email from you in the future.
Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to
recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and
location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another
easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their
choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt-out
of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop
all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter
doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
6. Honor opt-out requests promptly.
Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out
requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must
honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You
can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personal
identifying information beyond an email address, or make the
recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a
single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an
opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to
receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their
email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only
exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company
you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.
The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to
handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal
responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose
product is promoted in the message and the company that sends the
message may be held legally responsible.
There have been a small number of criminal indictments under the
CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 since its passage. To date, only a handful of
large-scale spam operations have been targeted by the Federal Trade
Commission.
Most email marketers probably don’t need to worry about the FTC
knocking on their door over a violation, but you should still ensure your
mailings follow the CAN-SPAM Act because it’s the law and because
email providers limit the deliverability of mail from bulk senders who are
not CAN-SPAM compliant. The rules outlined by the Federal Trade
Commission are straightforward and are very easy to follow. Be honest
about who you are, where your business is located, and the content of
your messages. Provide clear opt-out instructions and honor opt-out
request promptly. Do these two things, and you probably won’t have
much to worry about.
Interestingly enough, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 doesn’t actually
outlaw spam. The legislation does not require commercial email senders
to get permission before emailing someone. When the legislation was
first passed, some referred to it as the “You Can Spam” Act, because it
didn’t do anything to limit the amount of spam that people receive.
The CAN-SPAM Act also generally only applies to people living in
the United States. Many spammers are in developing countries around the
globe, which makes it extremely difficult to take any legal action against
them. Because of the limited jurisdiction of the CAN-SPAM Act and its
relatively light regulatory burden, spam continues to be a major problem
in the United States and the rest of the world.
FTC Endorsement Guidelines (United States)
If you are going to promote another company’s products as an
affiliate, you need to be aware of the Federal Trade Commission’s paid
endorsement guidelines. Generally, you need to disclose whenever you
are getting paid to promote a product or service for another company.
Your disclosure must also be “clear and conspicuous” and as close to the
endorsement as possible. This means that you shouldn’t try to hide your
disclosure in the footer of your messages or in some other inconspicuous
location.
The Federal Trade Commission issued a guide in March 2013 that
outlines disclosure rules and recommendations for paid digital media
endorsements titled, “.com Disclosures: How to Make Effective
Disclosures in Digital Advertising”.20
Here’s a great example email from marketer Pat Flynn about how to
properly disclose affiliate relationships in an email:
Pat Flynn
To: matt@mattpaulson.com
Subject: Limited-time Hosting Special (at $2.95/mo)
If you’re looking to start a new website soon, this is a deal you’ll
want to take advantage of. Bluehost, the hosting company I
recommend for those who are just starting out, is running a short
special deal for Smart Passive Income readers only.
Until next Wednesday, you can get a hosting account with a domain
for just $2.95 per month (marked off from $5.99/mo), which is the
cheapest hosting solution available at the moment. I don’t usually
mention deals in my emails, but this is such a good one I had to
make sure you saw it.
You can only get this special deal (or share it with a friend) by going
through the following link:
[Affiliate Link Here]
And yes, this is an affiliate link, which means that I do get a
commission from Bluehost if you purchase (at no extra cost to you).
Just wanted to be honest about that. Here’s the link one more time:
[Affiliate Link Here]
Thanks so much for your support, and I look forward to sharing
more with you about my Ghana trip and my upcoming summer trips
with the family soon! Cheers, and much love!
Pat Flynn
California Consumer Privacy Act (United States)
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was passed in 2018
with the aim of enhancing privacy rights and consumer protections for
residents of California. The law went into effect in January 2020 and was
expanded in November 2020 when voters passed Proposition 24, which
amended and expanded the provisions of the CCPA. The law allows users
to access their personal data, know who their personal data is being sold
to, decline the sale of their personal data, and request that a company
deletes any personal information that a company has collected on them.
The CCPA establishes several requirements for companies that do
business in California including:
Adding a “Do not sell my personal information” link to the
homepage of a business, which allows users to opt-out of the sale of
their personal information or request that the business delete their
personal information.
Implement processes to obtain parental or guardian consent for
minors under the age of 13.
Designate communication methods for submitting data access
requests.
Update the company’s privacy policy to include required disclosures
and outline California consumer’s rights under the law.
The CCPA applies to any company that does business in the state of
California, collects consumers’ personal data, and meets certain size and
scope criteria designed to exempt small businesses. Specifically, a
company must do $25 million in gross revenue, collect personal
information on 50,000 or more consumers, or earn more than half of its
annual revenue from selling consumers’ personal information.
If your company is based in the United States and meets the size and
scope requirements of the CCPA, you should take active steps to ensure
compliance with the law. Compliance with CCPA is not especially
burdensome, given that most small businesses will not receive many
CCPA requests from California consumers. The primary thing that
businesses should do to ensure CCPA compliance is to setup a “Do not
sell my personal information page” that is linked from the homepage of
their website. You can view MarketBeat’s “do not sell my information
page” at https://www.marketbeat.com/do-not-sell-my-information.
Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL)
The Canadian Parliament passed the Fighting Internet and Wireless
Spam Act (FISA) in December 2010. The legislation, better known by the
nickname of Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), went into effect
on July 1st, 2014. CASL requires that marketers only send email to
individuals who consent to receive messages, with a few exceptions.
CASL is arguably one of the most stringent pieces of anti-spam
legislation in the world due to its consent requirements and other
restrictions put in place by the legislation.
Under CASL, you can only send email to subscribers that have
expressly opted into your mailing list or to recipients that have passively
agreed to accept email through some form of implied consent.
For example, you can email anyone that’s purchased a product from
you or has done a business deal with you within the last 24 months under
the guise of implied consent. There are also a variety of exceptions for
recipients that you have an existing personal or business relationship with
and for recipients that you need to notify of a product recall, court order,
or updates and changes to an existing product or service they previously
purchased.
CASL also puts several other restrictions on marketers. The
legislation requires mailing list operators to have a working opt-out
mechanism. CASL also makes it illegal to harvest email addresses using
software and installing computer programs without consent. The
legislation makes it illegal to alter messages in transit and makes it illegal
to use false or misleading representations online in the promotion of
products or services.
The legislation is enforced by the Canadian Competition Bureau, the
Canadian Office of the Privacy Commissioner, and the Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). Individuals
that violate the legislation can face fines of up to one million dollars, and
businesses in violation can face fines of up to $10 million. The law also
allows private citizens to take civil action against spammers that violate
the provisions of CASL.
If you don’t live in Canada, you might think that the provisions of
CASL won’t apply to you. However, if you live in the United States or
another jurisdiction and have subscribers in Canada, you need to pay
attention to the legislation. CASL applies where “a computer system
located in Canada is used to send or access” an electronic message.21 This
means that CASL will apply if a sender in the United States sends an
email to a Canadian citizen who opens it on a computer or smartphone
located in Canada. While it remains to be seen if Canada will try to
enforce the CASL outside of its borders through extradition, it’s probably
a good idea to stay in compliance with CASL if you are going to have
any Canadian customers.
The American Bar Association has published an article that contains
additional information about CASL’s implications for citizens in other
countries titled “Canada’s Tough New Anti-Spam Legislation: Beware Its
Extra-Territorial Reach”.22
General Data Protection Rules (Europe)
The regulatory environment surrounding email marketing changed
dramatically in 2018 when the European Union’s General Data Protection
Rules (GDPR) went into effect. The primary aim of GDPR was to give
consumers control over the personal data that companies have about them
and to streamline data protection rules for businesses in the European
Union. The law impacts email marketers because it includes new
permission opt-in rules, requires businesses to store proof of consent and
requires businesses to provide a method through which consumers can
ask that their personal information removed.
Europe’s General Data Protection Rules are a concern for both
European businesses and businesses that have customers in the European
Union because it was written in such a way that it applies to the data of
citizens of the European Union, regardless of where the company is
located. This caused many U.S. businesses to scramble to become GDPR
compliant when the law went into effect in May of 2018. Other U.S.
businesses simply blocked traffic from the European Union because they
felt that complying with GDPR’s requirements were unclear and too
onerous to comply with.
GDPR’s new opt-in permission rules will perhaps have the biggest
impact to email marketers. The law requires that marketers receive freely
given, specific, informed, and unambiguous consent from a user. This
means that users must know specifically what they are signing up for,
provide their information to you freely, and click a button indicating they
want to receive email from you. Soft opt-in methods such as a prechecked box that opts a user into your mailing list or requiring users to
check a box to opt-out of receiving email from you are not in compliance
with GDPR.
The United States only requires you to not email users that have
opted-out of your messages under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Europe’s
rules are much stricter because you are only allowed to email people that
have given you consent to email them. This is one of the few anti-spam
laws in the world that makes unsolicited commercial email (spam) illegal.
Under GDPR, you also need to track consent so that you can prove
that a user opted-in to your mailing list. In practice, this will happen by
storing a user’s IP address, browser information and cookie information
for auditing purposes. Any email service provider that claims to be
GDPR compliant will likely do this for you, so it’s not something you
need to worry about as long as you verify your email service provider is
tracking proof of consent.
GDPR also allows users to request what information a business has
on file about them and allows users to request a business permanently
delete their data. This is a true “right to be forgotten” law that requires
businesses, upon request, to eliminate any trace of a user’s data from their
database. In the years since GDPR rules have gone into effect,
MarketBeat has only received a handful of requests from users asking for
their data to be removed or be provided to them for review. To comply
with these requests, MarketBeat has provided a tool that allows them to
download all the data that MarketBeat has stored about their account.
MarketBeat also has an unsubscribe page which allows users to
permanently delete their account and remove their personal information
from our database.
When GDPR rules went into effect, MarketBeat made several other
changes to comply with GDPR rules. We rewrote our opt-in forms to
make it clear what email users will receive when they sign-up for
MarketBeat. We rewrote our terms of service to include several specifics
relating to GDPR compliance and requests. We setup a special email
address for users to send GDPR-related requests to. We started logging
opt-in sources and IP addresses to prove user consent if that should ever
become necessary. We believe we are generally compliant with the
principles of GDPR, but it isn’t possible to prove compliance with the
letter of the law given the vagueness of some of its complaints.
While most U.S. businesses are unlikely to ever have to deal with
GDPR-related legal issues, General Data Protection Rules are a serious
matter for European companies. As of mid-2022, European regulators
have fined nearly 1,200 companies for failing to comply with GDPR
rules. Amazon paid the largest GDPR fine totaling €746 million in July
2021 for matters relating to cookie consent. A full list of GDPR fines can
be viewed at enforcementtracker.com.
Wrap-Up
While regulations that surround email marketing will vary
depending on what country you live in, you probably won’t have a lot to
worry about if you follow what I refer to as the three golden rules of
email marketing:
1. Only send email to people that have opted in to receiving your
messages.
2. Only send content that you would want to receive if you were a
subscriber to your mailing list.
3. Don’t be deceptive in the content of your messages, and don’t try to
hide your identity to your subscribers.
If you only send high-quality, relevant, and honest content to your
subscribers, and you only email people that have expressly opted into
your mailing list, it’s extremely unlikely that anyone is ever going to get
upset with you enough to try to hit you over the head with a civil suit for
failing to follow anti-spam legislation. You should still pay attention to
your country’s anti-spam legislation and try to follow its provisions, but
you won’t have a target on your back if you follow the three golden rules
of email marketing.
Action Steps:
If you live in the United States, verify that your email sending
practices comply with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
If you live in Canada, verify that your email sending practices
comply with Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL).
If you have subscribers in the European Union, verify that your
sending practices are in compliances with the principles of the E.U.
General Data Protection Rules (GDPR).
If you live in another country, research your own country’s antispam laws to make sure you comply with your country’s laws and
regulations.
Follow the three golden rules of email marketing.
CHAPTER NINE
Outbound Email Marketing
Most of this book has focused on using email as a means of building
an engaged audience and generating revenue by selling or recommending
products to that audience. While growing a community surrounding your
content can work well in many categories, it isn’t ideal in others. You can
easily build a mailing list in niches that cater to hobbyists and general
consumers, but it’s much more difficult to grow a mailing list if your
company sells a very specific product to certain types of people or
businesses. If your company makes a very niche product with a relatively
high price point and only has a few thousand potential customers, you are
much better off approaching your prospective customers on a one-on-one
basis rather than doing traditional list building and trying to attract an
audience.
For example, if I ran a farm implement dealer that sold tractors,
balers, and combines to local farmers, there might only be a few hundred
farms that would ever purchase equipment from my business. My
potential customer base simply would not be large enough for building a
subscriber list outside of my existing customer base to be worthwhile.
This doesn’t mean email marketing won’t work for this business, but it
does mean I would need to take a different approach.
I would still send email with news and product information to my
current customers, but that wouldn’t be my only email marketing
initiative. Instead of waiting for local farmers to sign up to receive email
from me, I would need to use email as an outreach tool and try to
schedule appointments with farmers or invite them into my dealership.
This marketing strategy, known as email prospecting, involves
sending personal email messages to certain members of specific
organizations in hopes of accomplishing a specific sales objective. When
you send a prospecting email, the prospective customers that receive the
message won’t have opted into your mailing list and generally won’t
know who you are prior to receiving your email.
At my fictional implement dealer, I might try to get referrals from
some of my existing customers. I would then send a cold email to the
referral and ask if there is any equipment that they plan on buying in the
next 12-24 months and show them what the dealership has that might be
able to meet their needs.
Email prospecting won’t necessarily replace the need to collect optins on your website, build an email list, and send a mix of content and
marketing material to your subscribers in hopes of generating sales. Even
large B2B companies with extremely high price points publish white
papers that require a reader to opt-in to their mailing list before getting
access to the white paper.
Think of email prospecting as a complement to your existing listbuilding efforts. While traditional autoresponder messages and broadcast
emails will engage subscribers that complete opt-in forms on your
website, email prospecting will engage potential customers that have
never heard of you or your business. Both strategies work together in a
complementary manner to generate new business for your company.
Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that draw
customers into your business by creating compelling content and earning
your potential customer’s attention. Gathering opt-ins and sending
autoresponders and broadcast emails to your mailing list are both inbound
marketing techniques. Outbound marketing techniques involve actively
identifying potential customers through list gathering, social networks,
and going out and getting their attention. Cold calling, cold emailing,
running commercials, placing advertisements, and attending trade shows
are examples of outbound marketing techniques. The remainder of this
chapter will focus on outbound email marketing, also known as email
prospecting. Email prospecting is the process of identifying potential
customers for your company’s products or services and sending them a
cold email in hopes of getting their attention.
Isn’t Email Prospecting Considered Spamming?
Throughout the first several chapters of the book, I recommended
that you only email people that have expressly opted-in to your mailing
list. However, I also suggest that sending a cold email introducing
yourself to prospects can be an effective marketing strategy if you run a
certain type of business. These two statements can seem somewhat
contradictory at face value but sending someone a personalized, cold
email introducing yourself is very different than spamming them.
Spamming occurs when a marketer sends a large volume of
unwanted commercial email over a period of time. Sending one or two
targeted messages to a specific person at a business for a specific reason
is not spamming. It’s the difference between sending a few people a
single, personal letter and incessantly sending 5,000 people mail they
don’t want. Sending cold emails for business development purposes is a
generally accepted practice in most industries.
Identifying Potential Customers
Amidst your inbound email marketing efforts, potential customers
will self-identify themselves by signing up for your mailing list. When
doing outbound email marketing, you will need to go out and identify
potential customers that you can approach. You probably already know
what types of people or businesses your potential customers are. You just
need to find the specific prospects that meet your criteria.
There are several ways that you can identify potential customers:
LinkedIn
LinkedIn has become an increasingly popular way for salespeople to
identify potential customers. A user’s LinkedIn profile will provide
detailed information about their career and personal interests, which
makes it a perfect tool to find potential customers. LinkedIn has
advanced search tools that let you home in on specific types of
people easily. While it is a great way to identify potential customers,
you shouldn’t use LinkedIn to contact your potential customers
unless you do not have access to their email address, because many
users don’t check their LinkedIn messages. Your message may then
get lost among the many less-targeted marketing messages that
subscribers receive.
Facebook Fan Pages and Groups
Identify Facebook fan pages and Facebook groups that are relevant
to your potential customers. People will frequently self-identify as
needing help to solve a problem by posting to a group and asking for
suggestions. If you see someone that has written about a problem
that your business can solve, send them a message through Facebook
to introduce yourself and tell them how you can help them.
Twitter Search
People will also frequently self-identify problems they need help
with by tweeting about them. For example, if you are a web
designer, you might do a Twitter search for a phrase like
“recommend a web designer” to find people who are looking to hire
a web designer. The day that I wrote this chapter, I found ten people
in the previous week who asked if anyone can recommend a web
designer to them. Search for multiple phrases people might use to
indicate they have a problem you can solve. Once you identify a
potential customer, tweet them, and you might be able to help with
their problem. Try to get their email address, so you can send them
an introduction email, or their phone number to setup a call.
Lead Scoring
If you have an existing mailing list, you can use a process known as
lead scoring to identify the subscribers most likely to become your
customers. Lead scoring is simply the process of calculating an
engagement score for your subscribers based on the actions that they
take, such as reading emails, clicking on links, requesting free
reports, following you on social media, etc. If someone is highly
engaged with your content, they will be much more likely to become
a customer of your business. By calculating a lead score for each of
your subscribers, you can see which of your potential subscribers
you should put the most time and effort into to acquire them as a
customer.
Compile a List
Consider hiring a virtual assistant, an intern, or a relatively low-cost
employee to help identify businesses and people that meet your
criteria. Have them collect all the key information you would need
to send a cold email and put it in a spreadsheet—including the name
of the business, the location, the owner, the business’s phone
number, and the owner’s email address. For example, if you wanted
to create a list of chiropractors, you could have an intern do a web
search for chiropractors in specific cities in the geographic region
you are targeting and add them to your spreadsheet. A list that you
compile yourself will generally be more up-to-date and accurate than
a list you purchase from a list broker.
Trade Shows
Consider getting a booth at the trade shows that are frequented by
your potential customers. While your first thought might be to get a
booth at an industry trade show, remember that industry trade shows
generally cater to people that work in an industry and not customers
that buy products from that industry. If you were a chiropractor, you
would want to get a booth at a trade show frequented by people that
have back pain and not an industry show for other chiropractors.
While at a show, collect as many business cards as possible, so you
can follow up with potential leads via email after the show.
Ask for Referrals
Whenever you get a new customer, ask them whether they can
recommend anyone else that might benefit from your company’s
products or services. By getting referrals from your existing
customers, you’ve instantly identified a new warm lead that you can
follow up on.
Finding a Potential Customer’s Email Address
When you identify a customer through social media channels such
as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, their email address may not be listed
on their social media profile. In some cases, you can get a potential
customer’s email address just by asking them. If this isn’t the case, you
will need to do some sleuthing on the web to identify a person’s email
address, so you can send them an introduction letter.
Here are some ways to find a potential customer’s email address:
Google Them
Google the name of your potential customer and the name of their
business (if applicable). You may find other websites or other social
media profiles that a person has created that do contain their email
address. Make sure you go through the first several pages of search
results to find all potential websites that may contain pertinent
contact information. For more targeted results, consider doing a
search of their company’s domain name. For example, you could
search “site:marketbeat.com Matthew Paulson” to find references to
me on my company’s website.
Make an Educated Guess
Most companies use a standardized format for their email addresses.
For example, all Bank of America employees’ email addresses are in
the format of firstname.lastname@bankofamerica.com. If I were a
Bank of America employee and you were trying to guess my email
address, matthew.paulson@bankofamerica.com would probably be a
good place to start. If you guess someone’s email address
incorrectly, the worst thing that will happen is the message will get
returned as undeliverable. You can figure out the format of a
particular company’s email addresses by doing a web search for the
company’s domain name followed by words like “contact’ and
“email.” For example, I found the email addresses of several Bank
of America employees by searching for “@bankofamerica.com
email.”
Make an Uneducated Guess
If you can’t figure out the format of a company’s email addresses,
you can also use a service called Email Address Guesser
(guesser.email) to generate probable email addresses for a person
based on their name and their domain name. You can use a Gmail
plugin called LinkedIn Sales Navigator (formerly called Raportive)
to figure out if any of the probable addresses are accurate. After
setting up Sales Navigator in your browser, open a Gmail account
and copy and paste all the guesses created by Email Address
Guesser into a new message. Hover over each address, and the
user’s other contact information will appear if the email address is
valid.
Use a Paid Service
There are several paid services that will help you identify someone’s
email address based on their name, geographic location, and the
company they work for. Intelius (intelius.com) and Spokeo
(spokeo.com) are two paid services that have large searchable email
address databases. You can also use business specific search tools
like Lusha (lusha.com) and FindEmails.com to find the contact
information for a specific person at a business.
Warm Up Your Prospective Customers
Before you begin writing a message to someone, try to find a
personal connection with the person you are going to approach. People
that you have no connection to at all are known as cold leads. Prospects
that have some connection to you, or have been referred to you by a
mutual acquaintance, are considered warm leads. It’s much easier to sell
to a warm lead than a cold lead, because people have a harder time
dismissing others that they have an existing personal connection with. If
you can turn a cold lead into a warm lead by identifying a mutual friend,
acquaintance, or interest, you are much more likely to have success from
your introduction email.
To identify potential connections with your prospects, look at their
Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media profiles to see if you have
any mutual friends or connections. If you find a mutual connection, ask
the connection if they would be willing to introduce you to the prospect
through email. If the connection doesn’t respond to your request, it’s still
worthwhile to mention the names of your mutual connection in your
introduction email.
If you can’t find a personal connection, try to create one through an
organization that you are both a member of, such as a university or a
service club. If that’s not possible, you can try to create a personal
connection through a common interest or hobby. Regardless of what kind
of connection you create, having common ground with a prospect will get
you a lot further than having no connection at all.
Writing Effective Cold Introduction Emails
After you have identified someone’s email address and have figured
what kind of personal connection you can make with them, it’s time to
send them an introduction email. Your introduction email should identify
any common bonds that you have with them, let them know how you
became aware of them, identify what potential problems they might have
that you can help with, and provide a clear call-to-action detailing the
next steps you would like them to take.
Here’s an example of an introduction email I might send if I were
offering consulting services:
Matthew Paulson
To: prospect@marketbeat.com
Subject: Help with your website?
Hi [Name] –
We haven’t had the opportunity to meet yet, but I saw you had
posted on Twitter that you are looking for a digital marketing expert
to help generate more traffic to your website. I wanted to take a
moment to introduce myself and see if there’s an opportunity for us
to work together to do just that.
My company, Matthew Paulson Consulting, works with small- to
medium-sized businesses like yours and helps them grow their social
media following and collect more email opt-ins with the goal of
driving more sales. We’ve helped several other [category of
business] businesses like yours and think that we could do a lot to
grow your audience online.
Would you be available for a phone call tomorrow or the next day to
see if there’s a way that we can help generate more website traffic
and leads for your company?
Feel free to respond to this message or call me on my cell-phone at
(605) XXX-XXXX at any time.
Matthew Paulson
Matthew Paulson Consulting
P.S. I saw that we are both connected to Laycee and Jared Kluin on
LinkedIn. I went to college with both Laycee and Jared. They’re a
great couple. Love those two.
There are several things that you should take note of in this email:
Focus on the Prospect
The content of the message focuses primarily on the prospect and
their needs. Start the email by using the person’s first name. Use lots
of “you” language to make the message more personal, and focus on
their specific needs, not what you have to offer.
Keep It Short
The above email is less than two hundred words long. Keep your
first introduction email short so that it’s easy for the recipient to
read. You can dive into detail on how you can help them in a phone
call or in a follow-up email.
Create a Personal Connection
At the bottom of this email, I mentioned that we had two mutual
connections on LinkedIn. The “P.S.” section of your email is a great
place to tell someone how you are connected to them without
interrupting the flow of your message.
Ask for a Next Step
At the bottom of my email, there is a clear call-to-action for what the
next step would be. In most cases, your next step should be getting
your prospect on the phone, so you can better qualify them and see if
they are a good fit for your services.
Use a Relevant and Personal Subject Line
There’s a good chance your prospect’s email inbox is already full of
other messages. You need to write an intriguing subject line to get
your message noticed. Subject lines with a question mark work
particularly well. Also use uncommon language that will instill
curiosity in the recipient. An example of a subject line that follows
these principles is “Strange question?” The subject line is short and
will coerce a prospect into opening your message out of curiosity
more than anything.
If you are looking for more resources about how to effectively write
a cold email, Steli Efti of Close.io created a resource titled “8 cold email
templates that will generate warm leads for your sales team!”,23 which
provides several great examples of cold emails that get great response
rates. John Corcoran has put together another great resource that provides
guidance on cold approaching people on the OkDork blog titled “How to
Connect with VIPs: 5 Tips for Cold Emails”.24
Following Up with a Potential Customer
Don’t be surprised if you don’t receive a response after you send
someone a cold email. Some of the most effective cold emails only yield
a response rate of 35%. Sometimes people just aren’t interested in what
you have to offer, and that’s okay. Not every prospect is going to become
a customer. That doesn’t mean you should immediately give up on a
prospect if they don’t respond to your first email.
It’s worthwhile to send one or two follow-up messages if the
prospect missed, or didn’t respond to, your first message. If you don’t
receive a response after the follow-ups, your prospect probably just isn’t
interested, and you should move on to the next one. Don’t send an
endless stream of messages asking prospects if they received your email
or if they want to get in a phone call with you. When you’re emailing
someone that hasn’t opted into receiving mail from you, you’re really
crossing over into the territory of spamming if you haven’t gotten a
positive response after the first contact.
Systemizing the Process
To effectively develop your business through email, you are going to
need to construct systems and processes to facilitate sending cold emails.
You will probably be dealing with many different prospects at once, and
many of them will be in different stages. You might have a deal in place
with one customer, while at the same time, you are pre-qualifying several
more leads and are negotiating contracts with two others. It’s important to
keep track of where you are with every prospect, so potential customers
don’t fall through the cracks.
Here are the five stages of turning a prospect into a customer:
Pre-qualification
You think the person has a need, but they have not yet confirmed
your suspicions. Prospects that you have emailed but haven’t
responded are at this stage.
Qualification
You have made contact with a prospective customer, and they have
confirmed that they have a need you can meet or a problem you can
solve.
The Offer
You make a specific written proposal or offer to address the
prospect’s need. Your proposal should contain pertinent information
about what kind of work you would do for them, including the scope
of work and pricing.
The Contract
Prospects at this stage have accepted your offer. They sign off on
your proposal, complete payment, and become customers of your
business.
Delivery and Fulfillment
After you sign an agreement and the customer makes payment, you
deliver the product or service you sold them.
The system that you put in place should be able to keep track of
where every prospect is at in these five stages. Each prospect should have
a next action associated with them, so you know when to take the next
step. You can use a customer relationship management system (CRM)
software or something as simple as an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of
where all your prospects are at.
There are also several software tools that have been developed over
the last few years that make following up with sales prospects over email
much easier. These tools tie into your existing email account and send
your prospects a series of automated follow-up messages (like an
autoresponder series). If your prospect replies to one of your prospecting
emails, the automated follow-up sequence ends and then you can pick up
and have a human conversation with the prospect. One tool that does this
is called Bluetick (bluetick.io).
Getting Started with Prospecting Through Email
When you first start doing email prospecting, commit to sending five
to ten cold emails each week. You can even send these emails through
your personal email account because of the low volume of outbound
messages.
Each message that you send should be personalized to the recipient
and their business. Never send a form letter. Prospects can recognize
generic emails from a mile away.
If someone responds positively to your introduction email, try to set
up a phone call or meeting with them to see if you can do business
together. If a prospect says they’re not interested, move on to the next
one.
If someone doesn’t respond to your email after four or five days,
send them a follow-up email. If they don’t respond to your first follow
up, you can send one final message if they are a particularly good
prospect. If they don’t respond to your third message, you should move
on to the next prospect.
There are too many fish in the sea to get hung up on one potential
customer.
Wrap-Up
Email prospecting can be an incredibly effective strategy for certain
types of businesses. If your company sells high price point products and
services and you have a relatively small customer base, you should
seriously consider whether email prospecting can complement your listbuilding efforts.
Action Steps:
Determine whether inbound email marketing or outbound email
marketing is the best approach for your type of business. If you
determine that outbound marketing is ideal, complete the steps
below:
Identify the first ten prospective customers you want to approach
and find their email addresses.
Write a sample introduction email that you can use to serve as a
template for future cold emails.
Develop a system to keep track of which step each potential
customer is currently in and what your next steps with them are.
Send your first ten cold emails.
CHAPTER TEN
Web Push Notifications: Your Second
Email List
In June 2013, Apple held its annual World-Wide Developer
Conference at Moscone West in San Francisco. CEO Tim Cook
announced new versions of iOS, OSX and the Mac Pro during his
keynote. The audience awed during each announcement as one would
expect, but perhaps the most important announcement Apple made that
day didn’t happen during the keynote. In a breakout session later that day,
Apple announced it would be allowing websites to send push
notifications to users directly through its Safari web browser. Website
owners gained the capability of sending users short notifications in their
web browsers, regardless of if the user was currently on their website.
Web push notifications (sometimes called browser notifications)
didn’t gain much adoption early on due to the lack of broad browser
support and the technical difficulty in setting up notifications on one’s
website. Chrome quickly added support for web push notifications to its
browser, but Firefox didn’t add support for push notifications until 2016
and Microsoft Edge didn’t add support until 2018. iPhone users are
unable to receive web push notifications as of mid-2022, but Apple has
publicly stated it would add support to iOS for web push notifications
sometime in 2023. Marketers really began to take web push seriously in
2017 and 2018, when most major browsers supported the technology and
software-as-a-service platforms became available that made it easier to
add web push notifications to one’s website.
How Web Push Notifications Work
When you visit a website that has web push notifications enabled,
your web browser will give you a message that says, “This website wants
to send you notifications. Allow or Block?” If you click the block button,
that user will not be able to ask you to opt-in to push notifications in the
future. If you click the allow button, the website will have the capability
of sending you notification messages through your web browser. You will
typically receive a welcome notification, which will appear on the lower
right of your screen if you are on Windows or on the upper right of your
screen if you are on a Mac.
This is an example of what a notification looks like in Windows 10:
After you grant a website permission to send you notifications, the
owner of that website can send notification messages to your web
browser as long as you have it open on your computer. If a notification is
sent when you are away from your computer, that message is typically
displayed to you whenever you log back on to your computer and open
your web browser. Website owners can send you notifications even when
you are not on their website and the permission that you grant them to
send you notifications lasts indefinitely until you either switch to a new
computer or unsubscribe from their web push notifications.
Why Push Notifications are Powerful Marketing Tools
Web push notifications are powerful tools for digital marketers
because you have the power to instantly draw people back to your
website after they have left. If you have just published a new post on your
blog, you can instantly let everyone that’s opted into receiving
notifications from you know that there’s new content on your website. If
you’re running a promotion or a sale, you can instantly put that offer in
front of your audience. Your audience doesn’t have to go into their email
inbox and find your message in the mess of the 100 other emails they
received that day. They don’t have to check your Facebook page or
Twitter account to see that you’re running a promotion. The message is
just right there on their web browser where they can’t miss it.
Web push notifications have very high engagement rates. Unlike an
email sign-up form where a user must type their personal email address
into a form, users only have to click one button that says “allow” to sign-
up to receive notifications from you. The simplicity of the opt-in leads to
much higher opt-in rates than you would see with email. Since a
relatively small number of websites use web push notifications and
because notifications are hard to miss, the clickthrough rates can be five
to ten times what you might normally get from sending an email to a
similarly sized list.
Similarities Between Email and Web Push
The primary focus of this book is email marketing, but there are
many similarities between web push marketing and email marketing.
Both marketing mediums allow you to build a base of subscribers that
opt-in to receive content, information, and promotions from your brand.
Both mediums allow you to build a long-term marketing asset that is not
controlled by a single major technology company. Both mediums allow
you to send a message to your audience whenever you have something to
share.
The technologies behind email marketing and web push marketing
are fundamentally different, but they can work together in unison to help
you achieve your marketing goals. I like to think of web push
notifications as a second email list, because it’s another group of people
that you can send messages to when you produce new content or have
something to promote. There will invariably be overlap between your
email list and your web push notification list, but there’s little risk in
sending a person the same message twice using two different marketing
mediums.
Choosing a Web Push Service Provider (WPSP)
To start gathering web push opt-ins on your website, you will first
need to sign-up for web push service provider (WPSP) such as OneSignal
(onesignal.com), PushCrew (pushcrew.com), or Push Monkey
(getpushmonkey.com). Your WPSP will perform the same functions for
web push that an email service provider (ESP) would provide for email.
Like an ESP, a WPSP will gather opt-ins, keep track of your subscribers,
allow you to send messages to subscribers, track the performance of your
notifications and keep a history of past messages sent.
As of 2022, there are more than 30 different web push service
providers that are vying to be the market leader. OneSignal had been the
largest player initially because it did not charge users for its service, but
they moved to a fee-for-service model like other providers in late 2018.
The market is currently wide open and there probably isn’t a single
WPSP that has more than a low double-digit market share. It remains to
be seen if the market will consolidate to a few dominant players in the
same way that the email service provider market has.
I don’t have a specific recommendation for a web push service
provider, but you should look for a service provider that allows you to
collect subscribers with the native browser opt-in. Your provider should
give you rich statistics about your web push campaigns, allow you to
setup interest segments so that you can send the most relevant
notifications to your users, and allow you to setup an autoresponder
series.
You should also look at the cost of the service and how those costs
will scale as your list size grows and as you send out more messages.
Pricing can vary dramatically between web push service providers.
Before you sign-up with a provider, have a clear understanding of what
you’ll pay each month when you have 1,000, 10,000 and 25,000
subscribers.
Setting Up Push Notifications on Your Website
Once you sign up with a web push service provider (WPSP), they
will collect information about your website and give you a plugin or code
snippet to install on your website. Most WPSP’s have developed their
own plugins for popular content management systems like WordPress,
which makes installing the code that gathers web push opt-ins on your
website a breeze.
In the process of setting up an account with your WPSP, you may be
asked if your site supports secure connections (HTTPS). Since HTTPS
support is a prerequisite of the web push notification technology, WPSPs
must use a workaround if your website does not support HTTPS that
involves using a two-step opt-in process. If your website does not support
HTTPS, you should take the time to add HTTPS support to your website
before setting up push notifications. You will receive a dramatically better
opt-in rate to your push notification list if your users are able to opt-in
through the native browser notification instead of the work-around twostep opt-in that non-HTTPS websites must use.
This is an example of the native browser opt-in:
This is an example of the non-native two-step opt-in:
If you click allow on the non-native opt-in, a new window will
popup on a domain controlled by your WPSP that shows the native
browser opt-in. Because the non-native opt-in requires two clicks to optin instead of one, the opt-in rate will be invariably lower than the native
browser opt-in rate.
As of mid-2022, several web browsers now require websites to use a
two-step opt-in process. Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Safari have all
limited the ability of websites to immediately fire a browser notification
opt-in request. Google Chrome still permits websites to fire the native
browser opt-in request, if the website gets a decent opt-in rate. I
recommend using the native browser opt-in request for Google Chrome
and the two-step opt-in process for other browsers. This may require
writing some custom JavaScript but is currently the most effective way to
maximize the number of opt-ins you receive on your website.
Once you have installed the code snippet or plugin provided by your
WPSP, you should verify that it is working properly. Navigate to the
homepage of your website and see if you are presented with the opt-in to
receive push notifications. Click the “allow” button to sign-up for your
own push notification list, then use your WPSP to send out a test
message. If you receive the test message, your website is properly
configured to collect web push opt-ins and send web push notifications to
its subscribers.
Initially, you will have a very small web push subscribers list. Don’t
get discouraged if you only have a few dozen or a few hundred
subscribers, because gathering subscribers is a cumulative process and
your subscriber count will grow over time.
What Types of Messages Should You Send Through Web
Push?
While you can send an email of any length, you are restricted to very
tight length requirements in your web push notifications. The title of your
notifications should be no more than 30 characters and the description of
your notification should be no more than 100 characters. You can also
include a square image with your notification and a 30-character call-toaction button below your message. You effectively have the length of a
tweet to communicate the contents of your message in your web push
notification.
There are no restrictions about the types of messages that you send
to your web push notification list, but your audience may unsubscribe if
you send them too many ads or irrelevant notifications. Just like with
your email list, you should send a mix of educational content, news, and
promotions to your web push notifications list. It’s just fine to send
promotions or offers for products and services that your business sells,
but you should probably send at least two pieces of helpful content for
every one promotional message that you send.
Creating an Autoresponder Series for Your Web Push List
Every major email service provider allows you to send a pre-written
series of emails to new subscribers called an autoresponder series. In the
same way, many web push service providers (WPSPs) allow you to create
an autoresponder series that sends a set of pre-written push notifications
to new subscribers over the first several days of their subscriptions.
The first email in your push autoresponder series is your welcome
message, which is sent immediately after someone opts-in. I recommend
that you send an ad or promotion as your welcome notification, because
users that have just opted-in are many times more likely to buy than other
users. At MarketBeat, we use a free trial offer for our premium
subscription as our welcome notification. We have gotten nearly 100 new
customers in the last year that have signed up through our welcome
notification.
For the rest of your web push autoresponder series, I recommend
sending one push notification per day for the first two weeks that
someone is a subscriber. You should include your most popular content
pieces as well as your core product offerings as part of your
autoresponder series. Feel free to refer to the sample autoresponder in
chapter four to get ideas for what to include in your web push
autoresponder series. You should include the same types of autoresponder
messages that you include in your email autoresponder series in your web
push autoresponder series.
How Often Should You Send Push Notifications?
Different brands have come to different conclusions about how often
to send push notifications to your mailing list. The website 9to5Mac.com
will send as many as 10 push notifications each day and will often send
out a notification for each new story they publish. Other brands may only
send as little as 3 or 4 notifications per week. My general
recommendation is to send one or two web push notifications each day
unless you are in an industry that has constantly changing information,
such as finance, technology, or news. In that case, you can get away
sending a higher volume of notifications.
The optimal time of day to send notifications is when your users are
using their computers. If someone’s not using their computer when you
send your message, they either won’t receive it, or will receive it along
with several other notifications when they return to their computer. You
can determine which hours of the day your website is most active by
looking at your Google Analytics reports. For most brands, the best time
of day to send a push notification will be mid-morning or early afternoon.
There are some exceptions though. A gaming website would likely find
that the best time of day to send a notification is late in the evening, and a
fitness brand would likely find that their best time of day to send
notifications is early in the morning when people are getting up to
workout.
Most push notifications will have a setting that allows you to deliver
your messages at the same time of day in a user’s specific time zone. If
you schedule your message for 3:00 PM, that means European and Asian
subscribers will get your message at 3:00 PM the following day. I
recommend that you do this for every push notification to avoid
accidentally sending people notifications in the middle of the night.
Best Practices for Push Notifications
Here are some of the best practices that I have developed for sending
web push notifications in the last few years:
Preview your notifications before sending them.
Every web browser renders push notifications a little bit differently
and includes a different subset of features included in the technical
specifications for web push notifications. For example, you can
include calls to action in Chrome, but can’t in Safari. Notifications
on Chrome will render differently if you are on Mac or on Windows.
Microsoft Edge’s push notifications will appear in the Windows
Action Center when they make push notifications available in the
next version of Windows 10. There are some general design rules,
such as keeping your title to under 30 characters, but you really need
to test your notifications in a real live web-browser to see what they
will look like to your users. That way notifications will appear as
you intended them to and won’t get cut off mid-sentence.
Use action buttons to increase clickthrough rates.
We include a call-to-action in every push notification that we send
out in the form of an action button. This gives a second opportunity
to instruct your users to act and gives them something obvious to
click on. This feature is currently only supported in Chrome and
isn’t supported in Firefox or Safari.
Use large images in your notifications.
Chrome on Windows and Android allows you to send a 720×480
rectangular image that appears with your push notification. These
make your notifications larger and easier to click. They also provide
you more screen real estate to communicate your message to your
audience.
Use custom icons for your notifications.
Every web push notification sent includes a small square image that
you can use to sell your content. If you don’t specify an image, your
default image (likely your logo) will appear. I recommend including
a unique image with each notification to maximize engagement and
click-through rates.
Don’t send the same notification twice.
If you send the same push notification out twice, it will have a much
lower clickthrough rate the second time around. Users are less likely
to click on ads and copy they have already seen before. Even if you
are promoting the same piece of content to your list again, use a
different image and different text to promote it.
Send multiple notifications per day to maximize reach.
Consider sending two or three notifications to your subscribers,
spread throughout the day, to maximize the number of people that
you get back to your website through push notifications.
How We Use Web Push at MarketBeat
Web push notifications were a significant source of growth for
MarketBeat between 2016 and 2020. Our company uses OneSignal to
collect
browser
notification
opt-ins
on
MarketBeat.com,
InsiderTrades.com, DividendStocks.com, and our other websites. We
show an opt-in to users immediately on the first page load to maximize
opt-ins. We currently have approximately 600,000 users that have opt-ed
into browser notifications. The messages that we send out to our
distribution list include free reports that link back to our website,
breaking news stories and promotional messages from our advertisers.
Web push notifications generated more than $250,000 per year in
revenue for MarketBeat in 2019 and 2020. When web browsers started
making it more difficult for websites to show the native browser opt-in
request to users in 2021, the number of new opt-ins our websites receive
each month started to decline. As of mid-2022, our push subscriber count
and revenue has leveled off. We are likely past the peak effectiveness of
using web push notifications as a marketing strategy, but they remain a
powerful tool to get users to return to your website.
Wrap-Up
Web push notifications provide an incredible opportunity that allow
you to build an audience on a newer marketing channel your competitors
may not be leveraging. There are no major downsides in gathering web
push subscribers, other than the monthly fee you pay to your web push
service provider (WPSP). Once you have the basics of your email
strategy in place, start gathering web push subscribers and building out
your web push strategy immediately.
Action Steps:
Setup a SSL certificate on your website to enable HTTPS traffic if
you don’t already have one.
Choose a web push service provider (WPSP) and sign-up for an
account.
Install your WPSP’s code snippet or plugin on your website so that
you can start gathering opt-ins.
Have your WPSP automatically send out new blog posts on your
website as a push notification.
Develop a long-term content strategy for the types of messages you
are going to send to your push list.
CASE STUDY #6
GoGo Photo Contest
GoGo Photo Contest (gogophotocontest.com) is a company that was
founded by Jason Shea, Stevie Shea, and myself in 2013. The company
helps animal shelters and humane societies raise money by running
donate-to-vote photo contest fundraisers. GoGo Photo Contest provides
software to manage the contest and expertise to promote and market the
contest in exchange for a small percentage of the contest proceeds.
The fundraiser that GoGo Photo Contest helps animal shelters run is
a pet photo contest where participants upload pictures of their pets
directly to the shelter’s contest website. Participants and their friends
purchase votes for a donation amount set by the animal welfare group,
which is usually $1.00 per vote. Participants will share and promote their
entries with their friends through social media and email to get additional
votes for their entries. At the end of the contest, the entries that have the
most votes will win the contest and get whatever prizes the animal shelter
sets for being in the top spot.
GoGo Photo Contest does not rely on traditional inbound email
marketing as a marketing channel. Trying to organically grow an
audience through traditional list-building methods would not be effective
for this business. First, GoGo Photo Contest was a relatively new concept
when we introduced it to the market, and most decision makers with
animal welfare groups weren’t searching for photo contest fundraising
software. Since many animal welfare groups were not aware of the
concept, most of them would probably never find their way onto our
mailing list. Second, there are only approximately 12,000 animal shelters
in the United States. This just isn’t a big enough set of potential
customers to organically grow a mailing list.
It simply wouldn’t be effective to use traditional list-building
strategies and hope that a meaningful number of animal shelters will sign
up for our mailing list and eventually become customers. While inbound
email marketing is not a great fit for GoGo Photo Contest, the company
has had great results by doing outbound email marketing and using email
as a prospecting tool to identify and market to potential customers. We
used many of the principles and strategies outlined in the outbound email
marketing chapter of this book to attract customers for GoGo Photo
Contest.
Our strategy involved identifying the executive directors of as many
animal welfare groups as possible using a variety of different methods.
Then we sent a cold email introducing them to GoGo Photo Contest and
showing them how our platform could help their organization raise
money. Our outreach emails educated our potential customers on the
concept of GoGo Photo Contest and suggest they consider it as their next
email fundraiser. We would typically send one email per month to an
animal shelter director for a few months before we stopped mailing them.
If a shelter directly responded and told us they’re interested, our team
would try to set up a phone call with them to sell them on the concept and
persuade them to run a contest.
GoGo Photo Contest also helps animal welfare groups grow their
own email lists. The contests that shelters run are inherently social in
nature, and many participants will promote their entries through social
media, email, and other word-of-mouth strategies. As a result, many of
the people that vote in their contest are not part of any of their constituent
lists prior to the beginning of the contest. In addition to the funds raised
directly through the contest, the animal shelters can send follow-up mail
and email in the future to solicit additional donations.
GoGo Photo Contest has helped hundreds of different animal
shelters run donate-to-vote photo contests primarily because of its
outbound email marketing efforts. GoGo Photo Contest’s only revenue
stream is its share of the proceeds from each contest, which works out to
about 9% of the fundraising total. The company has helped shelters raise
a total of $25 million since the first contest launched in October 2013 and
has generated six figures in annual revenue several times over for the last
several years. I am no longer directly involved in the company, but it
continues to be an email marketing success story and shows the power of
outbound email marketing.
FINAL THOUGHTS
At the beginning of this book, I argued that email marketing is one
of the most powerful marketing channels that companies have available
to them. Investing in email as a marketing channel will result in a
substantial return-on-investment and will generate dividends for a long
period of time. Given the Direct Marketing Association’s statistics that
the average business investing in email marketing will receive an ROI of
4,300%, any business should salivate over the potential results of
incorporating email marketing into their business.
After I heard those numbers the first time, my first thought was,
“How can I get this incredibly effective marketing strategy in the hands
of my friends and business acquaintances?” I did some digging to find
comprehensive resources that would teach all aspects of email marketing,
but that book just didn’t exist. So I set out to write one, and Email
Marketing Demystified is the result. By reading the book, you have
learned about the key components of email marketing, including learning
about email service providers, building a mailing list, creating a lead
magnet, setting up an autoresponder series, sending out broadcast emails,
writing effective copy, monetizing your list, staying compliant with best
practices and government regulations, and doing email prospecting. Now,
it’s your turn to take the practical knowledge outlined in this book and
implement it in your business.
If you haven’t already signed up with an email service provider,
that’s your first step. The next is to start collecting opt-ins on your
website using one of many popular plugins. Then you face the challenge
of writing the first few emails in your autoresponder series. In the
following several weeks and months, you’ll finish your autoresponder
series and start writing your first few broadcast emails in hopes of
generating some new sales. Over time, your mailing list will grow, you
will become a better copywriter, and your sales funnel will become much
more effective after trying out different things and seeing what works. If
you continue down this path and keep practicing the art of marketing, you
will have developed an incredibly powerful skillset that will generate
massive results for your business.
APPENDIX
Additional Email Marketing
Resources
If you would like to learn more about how you can grow your
business through email marketing, there are several other resources that
are worth checking out:
AutoResponder Madness (autorespondermadness.com)
AutoResponder Madness is an email training course produced by
Andre Chaperon that teaches marketers to use list segmentation and
storytelling to create incredibly effective autoresponder series that
drive engagement and sales. I have not personally gone through
AutoResponder Madness, but it is highly recommended by other
email marketers that I know and trust.
Drop Dead Copy (dropdeadcopy.com)
Host John McIntyre interviews expert level email marketers who
share their best tips on his weekly podcast, the Email Marketing
Podcast. McIntyre also offers professional copywriting services and
a membership program that provides training videos and sample
emails which you can use as the basis for messages to your mailing
list.
Email Players Newsletter (bensettle.com)
Ben Settle’s Email Players Newsletter teaches email marketers how
to write daily entertaining and conversational emails to your mailing
list. While the style of email marketing that Settle promotes isn’t
perfect for everyone, it’s hard to recommend an expert that knows
more about email marketing than he.
GetResponse’s Email Marketing Tips
Blog (blog.getresponse.com)
GetResponse publishes a daily email marketing tip on its corporate
blog. I have personally gotten several useful ideas by keeping up
with the content on their blog.
Feed the Wolf (feedthewolf.com)
Copywriting expert Ian Stanley regularly produces written content
about effective copywriting and email marketing. He also publishes
“The 8020 Email Copy Crash Course,” which teaches email
copywriting best practices.
MailChimp’s Blog (blog.mailchimp.com)
MailChimp regularly publishes email marketing news and advice on
its corporate blog. Their team regularly writes about new ways to
attract opt-ins and publishes content about trends in the world of
email marketing.
The Rebel’s Guide to Email Marketing
During the last five years, I’ve read more than a dozen different
books that cover aspects of email marketing. There are several
mediocre email marketing books that have been written and a couple
of good ones. The Rebel’s Guide to Email Marketing by DJ Waldow
and Jason Falls is one of the best print resources that discusses email
marketing.
Vero’s Email Marketing Blog (blog.getvero.com)
Vero publishes weekly content about marketing automation on the
blog. This blog is focused on more advanced strategies, such as list
segmentation and creating triggered email series.
Here are a few other resources that I have produced that you might
want to check out:
Online Business from Scratch
Online Business from Scratch is a book that I published in 2017 that
provides a step-by-step-process for developing your own online
business. It outlines the processes that I’ve used to build and grow
MarketBeat into a seven-figure online business. You can get your
copy of Online Business from Scratch at FromScratchBook.com.
My Personal Blog
I regularly publish new business tips and advice on my personal blog
at MattPaulson.com.
My Podcast Interviews
While I don’t host a podcast of my own, I am regularly a guest on
several top business podcasts. If you would like to listen to
interviews that I’ve done, visit mattpaulson.com/interviews.
THANK YOU
Thank you for purchasing Email Marketing Demystified and taking
the time to read it. Reading a nonfiction book can be a time-consuming
endeavor. Thank you for choosing to spend some of your valuable time
digging through all the information I have to offer.
If you would like to share your thanks for this book, the best thing
you can do is tell a friend about Email Marketing Demystified or buy
them a copy.
You can also show your appreciation for this book by leaving a
review where you bought it. To leave a review on Amazon, visit the
Amazon product page at MyEmailMarketingBook.com. Please be honest
with your review and how this book has or has not helped you on your
path to building an Internet business. I want everyone to know how or if
this book has changed your life in any significant way.
You can follow me online at my personal blog, MattPaulson.com.
You can also follow me on Twitter (@MattPaulsonSD).
If we have met in real life, feel free to add me as a friend on
Facebook (facebook.com/matthewpaulson). If we have not met in real
life, you are still welcome to “follow” me on Facebook.
I am also on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/matthewpaulson) and
AngelList (angel.co/p/mattpaulson).
If you would like to hear me talk about various topics, feel free to
check out the interviews I have done at mattpaulson.com/interviews or
check out my YouTube channel at youtube.com/user/MatthewDPX.
Thanks again and God Bless,
Matthew Paulson
October 1, 2022
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my many friends,
family members, and business acquaintances that have encouraged me
while I have pursued various entrepreneurial adventures over the last
decade.
I would like to thank my wife, Karine, for being incredibly
supportive, putting up with my unusual work schedule, and trusting me to
provide for our family through my business.
I would like to thank my children, Micah and Ady, for immense joy
that they bring to my life.
I would like to thank my church, Faith Baptist Fellowship of Sioux
Falls, SD, for the spiritual encouragement and exhortation I receive every
Sunday.
I would like to thank my business partners and team members,
including Rebecca McKeever, Don Miller, William Bushee, Ryan Quam,
Maureen Ohm, Andrew Peschong, Rebekah Van Maanen, Elizabeth
Semrau, Wendy Hellenga, Arin Gonseth, Elizabeth Schiefen, Laycee
Kluin, Kevin Tupy, and Tim Weelborg. Without them, my companies
would not be where they are today.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the many talented
people that worked on this book.
I would like to thank John McIntyre for writing the foreword of this
book.
I would like to thank Elisa Doucette and her team for editing this
book and fixing my many grammar and spelling errors.
I would like to thank Ellen Jesperson for designing the cover of this
book’s first edition.
I would like to thank Rebecca McKeever for designing the cover to
this book’s second edition.
I would like to thank James Woosley for creating this book’s print
and e-book layouts.
I would like to thank Stu Gray and Toby Lyles for putting together
the audio version of this book.
I would like to thank Tom Morkes and Perrin Carrell for helping
promote this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matt Paulson is the founder and CEO of MarketBeat, an Inc. 5000
financial media company that empowers individual investors to make
better trading decisions with real-time financial data, in-depth analysis,
and best-in-class stock research tools. MarketBeat has been recognized
by Barron’s, Entrepreneur, Financial Times, Forbes, and Inc. for its rapid
growth and success. With nearly 3 million email subscribers, MarketBeat
is the largest digital media company in the Dakotas.
As one of South Dakota’s most active angel investors, Matt has
invested in more than 75 high-growth startups, including Buffer, Bushel,
Density, Dollar Shave Club, Lyft, Prismatic, and Wikia. His venture
capital firm, Homegrown Capital, makes seed-stage and Series A
investments in high-growth technology companies in the Northern Plains
states. Matt also invests in commercial real estate projects in partnership
with Cresten Capital, including ownership interests in more than 25
apartment complexes, retail centers, and quick-serve restaurants.
Over the past decade, Matt has worked to create new startup
resources in South Dakota. He was instrumental in the creation of Falls
Angel Fund in 2016, which makes equity investments in early-stage,
high-growth companies in the Dakota’s. He founded Startup Sioux Falls
in 2019, which has since become the premier community and resource
organization for startup founders in the region. Matt became the
namesake of DSU’s Paulson Cyber Incubator in 2020, which aims to
accelerate student-led startup businesses. He has written eight
entrepreneurship and investing books. The Small Business
Administration has recognized Matt for his contributions to the startup
ecosystem, naming him their Small Business Champion in 2020.
Matt provides volunteer leadership to several area non-profits and
Christian ministries. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees at
Kairos University (Sioux Falls Seminary), on the Board of Directors at
Startup Sioux Falls, on the Campaign Cabinet for Forward Sioux Falls
2026, and as the Treasurer for Faith Baptist Fellowship. Matt is also the
director of Falls Community Growth PAC, which aims to elect progrowth, community-minded candidates to state and local office.
Matt lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with his wife, Karine, and
their two children, Micah and Adylin (Ady).
Connect with Matthew at:
Matthew’s Personal Blog – MattPaulson.com
Amazon - amazon.com/Matthew-Paulson/e/B001TA5CW6
AngelList - angel.co/p/mattpaulson
Facebook - facebook.com/matthewpaulson
LinkedIn - LinkedIn.com/in/matthewpaulson
Twitter - @MattPaulsonSD
Email - matt@mattpaulson.com
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Table of Contents
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
FOREWORD by John McIntyre
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE: Selecting an Email Service Provider (ESP)
CASE STUDY #1: MarketBeat
CHAPTER TWO: Building Your Mailing List Through Your Website
CASE STUDY #2: SignWell
CHAPTER THREE: 16 Ways to Grow Your Mailing List Independently
of Your Website
CASE STUDY #3: GMB Fitness
CHAPTER FOUR: Mailing Your List: How, What, and When to Send to
Your Audience
CHAPTER FIVE: Writing Email That Inspires Users to Take Action
CASE STUDY #4: USGolfTV
CHAPTER SIX: Monetization: Six Ways to Make Money with Your
Mailing List
CHAPTER SEVEN: Email Deliverability and List Maintenance
CASE STUDY #5: Oliver Wicks
CHAPTER EIGHT: Legal Aspects of Email Marketing
CHAPTER NINE: Outbound Email Marketing
CHAPTER TEN: Web Push Notifications: Your Second Email List
CASE STUDY #6: GoGo Photo Contest
FINAL THOUGHTS
APPENDIX: Additional Email Marketing Resources
THANK YOU
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR